"Nobody pays them to say anything"

<Quote>
What about Edward J. Naughton, the lawyer for Microsoft who claimed
APIs have been copyrighted for twenty years? You remember Mr.
Naughton, don't you? The fellow who claimed Google had misused GPL's
header files in Bionic, the part that connects Android to the Linux
kernel, by putting them under the Apache License? Everyone, including
Linus, told him he was all wet, but then did he really believe that
silly stuff in the first place? One wonders. You know who believed him
and spread the word? Guess. Yup! Florian Mueller. Wherever it is that
corporations find their supporters, one thing is for sure, they find
each other. Here's a trifecta, on Zoom:

Google supposedly put ...
www.sys-con.com, 19 Mar 2011
Google supposedly put Linux code into Android in a legally
questionable way that likely infringes the GPL, the license that
governs Linux, according to what IP litigator Edward Naughton said on
the Huffington Post Wednesday in a story entitled "Google's Android
Contains Legal Landmines for Developers and Device Manufacturers" that
patent watcher Florian Mueller picked up on.
Well, he *would*, wouldn't he? They both have received payments from
Microsoft for services. Syscon, Mueller and Naughton. Would you buy a
used car from any of them? I think you can tell a lot about a company
by the people that sing their song, actually.
Where do these corporate players find people willing to say whatever
they want said? Pilers-on on Android, while Microsoft and the other
proprietary dudes try to take Android down via litigation instead of
innovation. And no matter how many times these "experts" get things
wrong, you still see headlines, IP Lawyer Says Blah Blah. It should
be, IP Lawyer Forgot What He Learned in Law School, or Hopes You Don't
Know the Difference. Or IP Lawyer Says Silly Stuff. How'd you like
Oracle's expert being described by the judge in his ruling as
essentially not-so-truthful? Whatever these people get out of it, it
has to be enough to accept a tarnishing of their reputations.

That's what is so refreshing about the Free Software and Open Source
community. They are straight-forwardly truthful. And nobody pays them
to say anything. If there is a bug in the software, they tell
everyone. If they think you are wrong about something, they say so. If
you are right and they earlier argued against you, they manfully show
up and say they had it wrong.
</Quote>

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story 120601085105416

By PJ.