The core idea of Free Software is the notion that one's own creations have every right to be free. If I create something independently, it is my right to give it away for free. Why should some other company I've never heard of and/or never done business with get to charge license fees for something I created myself, without their help?
See the problem is quite a few companies do not think Android is 100% Google's own creation. Oracle is asking a price for the Java part. Apple does not want its own UI to be a part. And FSM knows what parts Microsoft feels entitled to.
Right, and those companies are full of shit, because Apple's UI is just an amalgamation of shiny icons and features that have been used countless times in countless places--in mobile, the web, standard oses, everywhere. Do they do a great job of packaging all these features together for a good user experience? Certainly. But 'good design' shouldn't be patentable.
Same with Java. Name one feature of Java that hasn't been done 100 times in one form or another in some other language
This is why software patents are absurd. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Regarding Apple's UI claims, IIUC that's mostly against Samsung's modifications of Android. Further, how many ways can you arrange finger-sized square icons on a portrait-mode screen? If two phones have two screens of similar size, and one puts 48x48 (or whatever) pixel icons on them, they will form similar grids.
Oracle is another matter entirely, and arguing that case requires discussing whether an unoriginal programming language and associated virtual machine should be patentable. Oracle gets no sympathy from me because of the way they've treated the various communities that built up around Sun's products, but beyond that, I think a rational case can be made that Google's independent implementation of a register-based VM should not be seen as infringing patents on Java's stack-based VM, and/or that Java's patents cover things that are obvious or non-novel.
The core idea of Free Software is the notion that one's own creations have every right to be free. If I create something independently, it is my right to give it away for free. Why should some other company I've never heard of and/or never done business with get to charge license fees for something I created myself, without their help?