In the ongoing legal issues between Samsung and Apple, it looks like the latter has requested records dealing with the Android source code. This comes as part of the second patent infringement case between Samsung and Apple. Here we have Apple requesting the information based on the argument that Android is being used in all the allegedly infringing products from Samsung.
Apple, coming by way of a court filing, has said this “provides much of the accused functionality.” Mark Lyon, who is a lawyer for Apple has said “it’s a question of transparency” noting that they “have concerns that they’re not doing a full search.” Basically, this all stems from a dispute over evidence gathering.
The interesting side here comes by way of Matthew Warren who is a lawyer for Google. Warren has said that Apple made a “strategic decision” in keeping Google off the complaint. This basically has Google as a third-party to the case which ultimately means they don’t have the same legal rights when it comes to items such as “reciprocal discovery.”
As far as turning these documents over, while that may or may not happen, Google has said they feel this may lead to “future discovery that we don’t think they’re entitled to.” Bottom line here, while these Samsung and Apple issues appear never ending, this is likely not the last time we will be hearing about this portion either.
[via Bloomberg]
Many readers including myself are slightly confused. Android is open source, so what is Apple actually requesting?
Portions, such as a bunch of the gapps and proprietary software aren’t open sourced. It’s only the kernel and core operating system that I really open source.