Free Republic

Palm, which defined mobile computing, has been bought by HP, which pissed away its stake in the same industry. So can HP do any better this time around? Palm didn't invent mobile computing; it arguably took the industry several steps backwards in creating a device entirely reliant on its desktop companion. But in doing so the company discovered what people wanted in a mobile computing device and pioneered many of the techniques that have made the iPhone so successful. Thus HP needed to buy Palm not for the innovation itself but for the patents that followed it. Palm's great insight...

Steve Jobs has apparently claimed that a patent pool is being assembled to "go after" Ogg Theora, the open source video codec used by the latest browsers from Google, Mozilla, and Opera. The claim was made in an email the Apple CEO appears to have sent in response to an open source software advocate who questioned Apple's attachment to the patented H.264 codec. On Thursday, Hugo Roy, an activist with the Free Software Foundation Europe, sent an email to Steve Jobs in response to the Apple CEO's much-discussed open letter on Adobe Flash. The note praised Jobs for his letter...