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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo is suing one of the internet's good guys. SAP is apologising for suing it's customers (Diageo). Oracle, well they have been known to retain the odd lawyer. When you go to court it should be a last resort. When you go to court everyone loses. I think this kind of case is so damaging to Yahoo. I hope Mozilla wins a huge sum

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Yahoo is known to be a patents troll — for example I remember when they sued Facebook in 2012 [1]

Now I don't blame anybody for trying to milk Facebook and I'm definitely not rooting for Facebook, but it's the general principle that counts.

Yahoo has been using patents offensively. When big companies can no longer innovate, they litigate.

[1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/yahoo-and-facebook-s...

Keep in mind this is Mozilla's presentation of the case, so definitely take with a grain of salt. Yahoo hasn't AFAICT made a public statement about the case, and the heavily redacted initial complaint probably paints the situation differently:

> On December 1, Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a legal complaint against Mozilla in Santa Clara County court claiming that we improperly terminated our agreement

If I had to guess, Yahoo seems to be arguing that the Verizon deal and restructuring didn't trigger the "change of control provisions", but Mozilla is arguing that the provisions were triggered. Since none of us have access to the original contract, it's impossible to say who is right, but with so much money on the table it's no surprise that the lawyers were brought in.

> When you go to court everyone loses.

Apart from the lawyers.

I've never been a bigger believer in this than now: recently had several conversations with lawyers hired to advise my company. Every single statement they made was hedged to protect themselves in the event they were wrong. They would only tell me what the law said by including copies of the actual law text. They would not directly answer questions about how the law can be interpreted based on case law and other precedents. Their only value was in providing the law text slightly faster and more conveniently than I could do so myself. Their chief concern seems to be protecting themselves from any blame, not protecting their client.

You either have bad lawyers, or are a bad client. (seriously)

I get so tired of hearing this. In my experience, the majority of practicing lawyers do everything in their power to stop their clients from going to court because they think it's a waste of time.

Most of their clients force them to do it anyway.

Meanwhile, the lawyers take the blame for being forced to do what their clients ask, despite their clients being 3 year olds about it.

Not blaming, merely stating that lawyers on both sides will do well.

Even taking the bright-side interpretation though: at least one of them failed in removing the further litigation cost and risk, their goal as you say is to protect their client as you say and that is often the best way.

Good point. All the people lose.

Lawyers are people too, they are just way better at playing the game than you or I.

Yahoo is slowly dying, and Mozilla had just put them in another corner.

If them, Yahoo - have any reason to believe they will win this case, then certainly what did Mozilla expect?

Isn't Yahoo already dead? I thought they'd been carved up for parts and sold off to Verizon as "Oath"?

I was somewhat sympathetic to poor old Yahoo, but I hope Mozilla takes Verizon to the cleaners in court.

> I was somewhat sympathetic to poor old Yahoo

Isn't it weird how we anthropomorphize companies like that? It's just a name. One that can be bought and worn like a mask by pretenders.

Well, they are in a painful metamorphosis. They were bought by Verizon, and if Verizon can successfully kill off net neutrality Yahoo will probably undergo a resurgence.

Since where Mozilla is the good guy?. In fact, since Mozilla fired one of the founders for political reason, Mozilla is turning from bad to worse: a) Is breaking plugins just for the good of change. b) The browser is bloating more and more for each new version. c) Is adding new features that never asked for.

Developers aren't happy, customers aren't happy and now, partners aren't happy. Google is happy.

1) Since they did not fire that founder, he retreated, 2) they broke those plugins to achieve significantly better performance, security, and an easier to work with, less often breaking extension API, 3) they need to bloat their browser to keep up with webstandards, other browser vendors are doing it just as well for the same reason and 4) is adding features that maybe you didn't ask for, but they've probably received good feedback for. They know more about their users than you do.

> a) Is breaking plugins just for the good of change.

Nobody will take you seriously if you think that the biggest browser re-write since Microsoft introduced Edge is "just for the good of change".

Mozilla has always been the good guy, but only sometimes for technical reasons. They have been the good guy for their constant fight to keep the web open. They are the only for profit company that I happily give the benefit of the doubt.

Well, and they're hardly "for-profit". The Mozilla Corporation technically is, but the Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a Non-Profit, so is forced to invest their money into their specified mission.

Therefore if the Corporation makes more money than they feel like investing, they either have to put it aside for later investments or pay it out to the Foundation, which is then legally forced to invest it.

The only real thing where they could shove money to the side is with paying their workers too high wages.

>Developers aren't happy, customers aren't happy

I am both of these and could not disagree more.

Everyone I know who uses Firefox is happy with it. None have switched from Firefox to Chrome due to the plugin system changing. I think you vastly overstate the number of people this has adversely affected.

Firefox is removing an absolute ton of bloat. It's slimmer than it ever has been in a long time.

Except on Mobile. (Let's ignore Firefox iOS since that's really just webkit with a better UI.)

Either Mozilla know something I don't, or they're sticking with a sinking ship and forgot to jump to the robust ship that was launched quite a few years back.

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