These are defensive patents. Google entire culture is different than say Microsoft.

Google believe in all ships rising also helps them. Versus lowering competitors ships helps them which is the Microsoft and other old tech companies approach.

That is why they buy up patents like what they did with Motorola but use for cross licensing NOT to collect royalties. We look at Android and Microsoft collects patent royalties such as they get more per Android device than Google. That is just the difference in cultures.

Google even lets one of their chief competitors, Amazon, use Android without any fees paid to them. Amazon turns around and uses for the Echo, Dot FireTV and majority of their other hardware and then bans everyone on their marketplace from being allowed to sell competing Google products.

Not just Amazon will NOT sell but bans every other company on their market place from being allowed to sell.

Yet Google still just gives it away.

Google owns Android and Chrome which are by far the dominate clients. Then owns the #1 and #2 most popular Internet sites with search and YouTube.

They create SPDY which is a better solution and save cost and really no reason needing to share. Yet they give it away to the standards committee. Who then changes and Google goes back and moves to the standard with HTTP2.

Google is doing this while being in the dominate position. When MS was dominate you would never see them doing something like this. Honestly it is not really smart business but glad Google cares more about the overall industry moving forward. They get all ships rise is good also for them.

Security is another perfect example. They invest and find all the major security vulnerabilities like Shellshock, Cloudbleed, Heartbleed, Metdown, Spectre among others.

They share these vulnerabilities and even mitigations to the entire market because all ships rising helps Google and just how they look at it.

They find vulnerabilities with Microsoft and give them 90 days to fix. MS fails to fix and b*tches instead of thanking Google.

One of the biggest is the silliness from the Mpeg-LA. They charge ridiculous license fees with mpeg-2. Google saw that and invested into creating VP8. That forced the Mpeg-LA to stop extorting money.

But Google does not keep it just for themselves and use as a competitive advantage like any "good" business would do.

Instead they not only give away for free but then also protect anyone from patent infringement. That is crazy.

Give away for free and then also protect?

Some of the IP they give away is just crazy. Borg was novel and just incredibly valuable and they give away Borg through Kubernettes (K8). Who does that? Well all ships rise and so do they.

They do not charge royalties for IP like Microsoft and the other do. They sure have some incredible IP but they just give it away. Map/Reduce, Text2Vec, GFS, WaveNet, or so many different incredible papers. I just love they share their "secrets" and help everyone move forward and do not just keep to themselves.

But they also do the "right" thing and not something that just gets them a buck or a billion bucks.

Perfect example is China. The China government tried to hack Gmail accounts of their citizens data. Google walked away from billion in China and said that is not acceptable.

But then we have Apple hand over all their customers data to the government but also the encryption keys. Just the perfect contrast you can have.

"Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud users"

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...

Google is a new tech type company that has a very different culture than the old tech companies. They believe in all boats rise helps also them instead of trying to hurt competitors with things that do NOT move the industry forward.