Kirk, You are mistaken. I was the individual who patented these techniques while I was an employee at BMC Software (the patent rights were assigned to BMC). Corporations are not allowed to patent anything, only individuals.
However, I agree that patents for software are not a good idea, but copyrights are. Patents were primarily used by BMC as a marketing tool. I was involved in the litigation personally, and the claims were not thrown out as prior art. A deal was cut with CA who had purchased Legent and the lawsuit was dropped. Tom Harper -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kirk Talman Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 5:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones BMC patented the 3270 datastream compression process in their early product for compressing CICS inbound and outbound streams. When Duquesne Systems TPX product had the same functionality but was not a "compression product" per se, they did not sue. When the same code was used to build a stand-alone compression product, they sued. [I can't remember if this was before or after the creation of Legent.] By the time the techies were cut off from the discussion, all claims for the patent had been tossed as prior art. A whole new set of claims were made. Never did find out the outcome, other than the lawyers made a lot of money -- as always. Software patents are another way to keep lawyers enployed. "Going to court is losing a cow for the sake of a chicken." One thing I always wondered: TPX had the ability to have mulitple "personalities". (I added the "batch" one and several others.) Was the reason a separate code cut was taken for the compression product to keep TPX out of the law suit? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
