> There might be something in that, but it strikes me very much > as 'locking > the stable door' if that was the thought process which > occured: the redbook > in question has been out for over six months. Pulling the Hercules > references now seems pointless. Also, if IBM had substantive > IP concerns > about Herc (and there's no reason to suspect that they do), > they would go > after Jay, Roger, and the lead developers, not just pull > references from a > redbook!
True, but remember that we're dealing with lawyers here, who have a really eccentric viewpoint of How Things Work and What's Important. If the goal is for IBM to protect the 390 intellectual property, they have to be "vigilant and/or diligent" in pursuing and enforcing copyright and usage of same. If they let this slide, then some other smart lawyer type *might* be able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of another lawyer type that they haven't been pursuing it appropriately, and IBM would lose the protection of copyright law for the S/390 intellectual property. This falls under the heading of A Very Bad Thing for corporate lawyer types -- consider the price paid by the folks at General Mills when they let the Jell-O(tm) trademark fall into the public domain. Thus, they can't be seen to allow such references to become "genericized" or risk losing the legal protection of the information. > That question has been in a lot of peoples heads for some > time, and I can > think of very few people who would disagree with you. If they > were foolish > enough to go for the latter option - use legal muscle to shut > down a very > successful open-source operation (or try to shut it down; it > would just go > overseas, it ain't going away!) - they would loose a hell of > a lot of the > goodwill capital they've built up in the open-source community. Yep. Thus, I think, the quiet approach -- don't ask, don't tell, don't promote, don't persecute...unless the Hercules guys do something so egregiously stupid in public that IBM can't possibly ignore them any longer. I think Jay, et al are smarter than that, but then again, I've been wrong before on the open source community. -- db
