The industry isn’t “cheating”. Patents are formulated and protected by law here in the United States. Face it. Google is being run by a bunch of arrogant boys who thought that they could ignore patent-holders’ rights and try to co-opt their technology without paying for it. The truly amusing thing is that Google apparently thought that, because they’re giving away Android ostensibly for free to ODMs, that nobody would sue them. Well, to say that they miscalculated is a huge understatement. Google is going to have to license the patents it should have licensed in the first place; and, if they refuse and take their chances in court, they will probably have to pay treble damages for willfully infringing. The emails revealed in court thus far show that Google was aware of its obligations to license the patents but wilfully decided against it.

You’re delusional. There is fundamentally no difference between software — and firmware/microcode executing in hardware. And few people would argue that hardware shouldn’t be patentable  I love how people that own nothing and create nothing like to argue that those who invest shouldn’t be able to profit from their inventions. Want to know what that produces? Welcome to China. Where there is zero respect for intellectual property, people copy each other’s rubber dogshit technology, and everyone races to the bottom on price and quality. Have you actually seen the cars that China produces? I saw an amusing video recently where they did offset crash-testing. The result: Epic Fail. In a market where you can’t leverage your intellectual property to protect yourself from being ripped-off by your competitors, the result is constant price-undercutting and creation of crap. But, hey, maybe you like buying crap.

The problem that I have with Google is that they’re leveraging a monopoly in search to dump Android onto the market at below-cost, and in a manner intended to undercut competitors. This is horrible for the free market. It will force competitors out of the market, and will eventually create a discincentive to innovate.

What I would prefer is to see all of the mobile OSes have a similar price structure. This will ensure the greatest amount of competition. Let them compete on technical merit, not on artificially low prices from a monopolist.

Any one who thinks that Android is open source DOES NOT know what open source is. Open source is not free software, that is available dime a dozen. So try and understand open source then you will understand why most people think it is not open source in the true sense, NONE OF GOOGLE PRODUCTS ARE TRULY OPEN SOURCE. Google just uses that term in its PR to give a false sense of openness to google. Everything google does eventually feeds back to Googles money making services. So android being given away for free is not CHARITY, don’t be in that illusion. Oracle is not suing for no reason and Google realizes that they will have to pay, and to Microsoft and to anyone else who decides to go after them.

Make no mistake Google is in this for the money it HAS NEVER been about anything else, they leech on your information and make money off of you and your information (so even Google search is also not really free if you think about it). They have been caught lying many times and they are equally evil (if Microsoft or Apple or Oracle is so). If the patent system is screwed then it is equally screwed for all companies. Just ask Microsoft (or Apple etc) for the hundreds of millions of dollars they had to pay for equally trivial patents. 

So google should just Man up and pay what is due and do business just as every one else is, it is part of the game. No special treatment should be given to Google for any reason especially the illusion of Google being open and free and the saviour.  

The days of Android being free, and based on others IP, are quickly coming to an end. Don’t cry. Don’t prolong it.

Either pay others for using their IP or come up with a work around.

What a bunch of one-sided nonsense. You’re just repeating evil Google propaganda.

Say you’re a small company and you spend few million on R&D over several years and you develop a revolutionary product. And you file a patent to protect all the R&D expenditures.

Are you telling me that this is all a waste and that EVIL company like Google should be able to COPY (like they’ve done with almost everything they’ve “invented”) for FREE??? ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT I AM AN IDIOT FOR EXPECTING PROTECTION!??!

Give me a break! Patent system is not perfect but it does provide some protection from evil companies like Google that just copy other’s work and release it for FREE and slap their shitty ads all over it.

No, very few of the companies you name are making profits at all, never mind “huge profits.”