> 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 typeI know of no jurisdiction this is the actual case for copyright. > 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 Trademark rules are quite different. A trademark identifies your product so if you aren't making sure it identifies your product you are not doing your job. If Hercules was called something like PC/390 then that might be a real issue. > 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. Well if IBM wants to discredit itself completely in the eyes of their customers and the community I can't think of many more effective ways. When the rest of us end up dropping S/390 patches and not testing compilation of S/390 stuff because of lack of ability to test only they and their customer base lose. If they have sense they will do what Palm did with the emulator folks - release a commercially supported and branded Hercules product to replace their toy S/390 on a board product. That would also nicely solve the licensing issue for non Linux OS's and generate IBM a tidy revenue stream as well as letting them bury the expensive low volume hardware board. Alan
