On Sunday, August 14, 2011 3:53:45 AM UTC+2, mP wrote: > > > http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/ibm-breaks-oss-patent-promise-targets-mainframe-emulator.ars > > > Patents helping the little guy...
For those who don't want to read it all, it's IBM suing the pants off of a small company that's selling support services for an open source emulator of some fairly ancient IBM hardware. With their gigantic patent portfolio, of course. Salient notes: (A) This is the poster child case at least as far as the defendant is concerned: It's like the getting stoned (in the execution, not the drug, kind of way) by lottery amongst the independent tech enthusiast crowd. How the heck can you NOT risk stepping on a random mine in this minefield? Yes, I know, reform might help, but just so long as we're all on the same page that the current system has massive downsides already. (B) IBM promised not to use their portfolio against FOSS. One could argue IBM is going after a seller of support and not the FOSS project themselves, but I say potayto potahto - if you shut down any and all commercial activity surrounding a FOSS project you're basically just putting the kibosh on the project itself, so if that's how IBM interprets its promise, it's a pointless one. (C) IBM sent a half-page letter + 9 pages worth of 'non-exhaustive' patent listings that TurboHercules 'might' have infringed upon. The first step in a legal fight is for TH to first spit through all of those and then through the rest of IBM's 5 million patents, tally up the potential damages, and then start preparing a defense (i.e. finding prior art or showing how their thing doesn't infringe, or at least rewriting bits to get there). That's going to cost literally millions of dollars, so effectively this guy has no legal recourse. Instead he's praying for a public recourse: Get this out to the world and try and burn IBM's public image amongst the tech crowd down so much that it's cheaper for IBM to let this one go than to try and repair the damage to the brand. That last bit (public outrage) doesn't work against trolls but it might keep the bigger companies in check. It would help, though, if we the rank and file could substantially agree that in any case the current system is absolutely unacceptable and stifling innovation, even if we can't agree on how to fix the problem. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/C_qczyVyYYAJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
