40 Busy Years Later, Paul Allen, a Microsoft Founder, Considers His Creation | Hacker News Reader

40 Busy Years Later, Paul Allen, a Microsoft Founder, Considers His Creation

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92 pointscamurban31 comments

I liked Paul Allen more before he decided to become a patent troll.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487032949045753852...

The upside is that he became one only after Microsoft itself turned into one.

With the recent many posts about Microsoft I've seen several people accuse MS of this.

I don't remember patent trolling being in the laundry list from my days reading Slashdot. Can anyone shed some light on what these comments may be referring to?

I think what they are probably referring to is the patent tax that is paid for every Android phone:

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/16/patents-that-fuel-microsofts-a...

But that does not make Microsoft is not a patent troll[1], since it also produces hardware/software that it is covered by the same patents. Whether patents are any good is a different discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll

Interesting. I hadn't heard about that.

How much is known overall about the 'taxes' that the mobile players pay each other? The lawsuit timeline is pretty crazy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

Jonathan Schwartz of Sun has many blog posts about Microsoft using patent trolling as a licensing negotiation tactic.

Also, SCO vs. IBM (which Microsoft helped bankroll).

Aren't you confusing Paul Allen with Nathan Myhrvold? It seems that Allen's company actually developed the concepts it holds the patents for; Myhrvolds' Intellectual Ventures is the one buying up patents and making a business of licensing them under threat of lawsuit.

Just because a company is suing someone for patent violation doesn't make them a patent troll.

I'm confused about this distinction between Paul & Nathan?

>Mr. Allen's lawsuit comes amid high-profile successes of firms such as NTP Inc., which enforce patents without making products and have been called "patent trolls" by critics.

What is this distinction supposed to serve? I see "Mr. Allen's lawsuit" and I also see that he purposefully kept Amazon & Microsoft out, which means he must be involved somehow personally.

> Another Microsoft veteran, former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, has amassed thousands of patents and secured hundreds of millions of dollars in patent-licensing deals from telecommunications companies and others. Mr. Myhrvold's Seattle-based firm Intellectual Ventures patents some of its inventions but also acquires patents to license.

Ok... yes Nathan is doing that separately. This is about Paul.

He also gave at least $100 million to Ebola, $500 million to charity, and funded several health science and general science initiatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen#Paul_G._Allen_Family...

>Paul Allen has given more than $1.8 billion towards the advancement of science, technology, education, wildlife conservation, the arts and community services in his lifetime.[28] In 2010, Allen became a signatory of The Giving Pledge, promising to give at least half of his fortune to philanthropic causes.[29] In December 2014, Inside Philanthropy named Allen as their "Philanthropist of the Year;"[27] Allen's direct giving in 2013 totaled $206 million.[30]

People are not one dimensional creatures.

Why not he release Microsoft products for free! Instead of doing like US govt (Killing people on one side and doing charity on another side), he could do something best he could do in his field.

What does that even mean? Like, Paul Allen should just pay for all the expenses Microsoft incurs to develop its products and then Microsoft can give them all away for free instead? That will work out great. Paul Allen can pay for everything for a few months and then he can run out of money and Microsoft can shut down and lay off 110K employees, 200K with contractors factored in.

Just like GNU/Linux he could release the whole thing is a community developed software

Sure, he could do that if he had any kind of legal right to do so, which he does not. If all of Paul Allen's net worth were in Microsoft stock (and it certainly is not), he'd own less than 5% of the company at this point. Paul Allen couldn't release all of Microsoft's code any more than I could.

And of course, even if it were possible, Microsoft would need to come up with a new way to generate the 87 billion dollars in revenue it just lost, or else lay off 200 thousand people.

Not that I want to dismiss his contribution, but sometimes there are huge tax implications behind these donations, and I know of at least one occurrence where a half-billionaire SAVED money by donating some to charity.

Can you explain the way this works? I hear stuff like this all the time, but my (admittedly limited) tax knowledge says this is not possible. Donations to charity allow you to reduce the gross income you are taxed on (in the US at least). However, you are not saving any money this way. The top tax bracket is basically 40%, so if you donate 1 million to charity, you reduce your gross income by 1 million, saving you at most 400K in taxes, but you donated 1 million, which means you lost an extra 600K vs just paying your taxes.

I don't know whether that story is true, but if so, it would be done by putting the money into a 'charitable' entity that returns the money in a less- or non-taxable way. This is not really something that could be done in the United States outside of fraudulent activity.

>I know of at least one occurrence where a half-billionaire SAVED money by donating some to charity.

Link?

Odd puff-piece with little substance.

I agree, and I am also amused why it got so many upvotes?

edit: grammar

Paul Allen - correctly so in my opinion - gets a lot of respect from hackers.

Not on HN. Because he's a patent troll. I am also surprised at the upvotes.

My guess is that it's part of the campaign to make developers love Microsoft by reminding them that Microsoft was once a startup too and like Apple, it has it's own folk heroes. I guess they overlooked the fact that people on HN apparently don't like this guy.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100829012006...

403.

I'm not getting a 403, but anyway here's an archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20140830224034/http://www.grokla...

Is it his creation still? What makes it so - several thousand lines of legacy code or the name of the product?

You might be wondering why you got down-voted. I'll help you out. To create something is to give birth to it kinda like how I imagine you have parents who birthed you. I imagine with all your success and hard work, you don't really feel like your parents "own" you but you wouldn't say to them, "you didn't create me" because that would be illogical. Same thing for Paul. He created Microsoft with Bill Gates. You can't take that from him.

Anybody else have an issue with Microsoft starting out using Harvard's computer to develop their first product (for free)? Theft of services to me...

Yea, seriously! Harvard should sue. If it wasn't for Harvard providing that computer (FOR FREE!!), Microsoft wouldn't even exist. These guys man. They just show no respect. Harvard deserves at least 10% -- maybe even 20% -- of M$ for their seed investment of a (FREE!!) computer to hack on. And if you tell Harvard this and they go ahead and sue and get 20% I'm gonna sue the shit out of you if you don't somehow get Harvard to give me some of that percentage because they wouldn't have even thought to do it if it wasn't for this (FREE!!) comment.

Harvard's endowment is $36billion. I think they are doing ok.

No, because a computer is a tool, and if you lend your tools to someone who then makes money from their own creations, they don't owe you a dime. Now, if you rent your tools to them and they don't pay rent you can probably sue them for it, but it still doesn't entitle you to ownership of their IP. That's simply not how the world works.

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