[CLUE-Talk] Something to think about

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 00:11, Jeffery Cann wrote:

> Was this someone's opinion?  JK because IBM has more patents than any other 
> technology - like orders of magnitude more.  In fact, the IBMer who came to 
> Jan CLUE meeting displayed a graph which depicted just how many more patents 
> IBM received this past fiscal year.

There's been a lot of speculation about this, but I really doubt IBM is
gunning to shut down competitors using patents. SCO is a special case. 

I've interviewed a few folks in IBM legal about patents before, if what
they told me is true (and I don't have cause to doubt it...) they tend
to view their patent "warchest" as primarily a defensive weapon, not a
means to knock out competition. Mainly, they use it for cross-licensing
purposes so there aren't endless suits between IBM and the rest of the
industry. Instead, if Intel says "hey, your PowerPC processors infringe
on these patents," IBM can simply reply "and the Itanium infringes on
these patents. Let's agree to cross-license and move on." 

What the folks at IBM really seem to hate are "companies" that apply for
patents for things they never develop, then sue when another company
seems to infringe in an attempt to get "windfall" profits without taking
any risks of entering the market themselves. 

Let's think about this... SCO harrassed IBM into this position. IBM
didn't go suing SCO out of turn, they're responding to a bullshit
lawsuit in a fashion that will:

1. Negate SCO's claims and put IBM on the offensive. 
2. Threaten SCO's few non-Linux products. They chose only four patents
to exercise here. If successful, they could take out UnixWare,
OpenServer, SCO Manager and Reliant HA. 
3. Make an example of SCO.

I don't see this as IBM gearing up to threaten other Linux vendors or
Unix vendors. If this was IBM's stance, they could have sued Microsoft
or Sun years ago. Two reasons why they wouldn't do this: 1. Very, very
bad PR. IBM doesn't want to appear as a litigious company, they want to
make money by offering services and hardware. 2. Sun and Microsoft have
patent portfolios of their own. 

Would IBM sue a Linux-related company for infringement, or even a
project? I sincerely doubt it. Why bite the hand that feeds you? IBM
realizes that it gets plenty of free work out of the open source
community. Also, the GPL does deal with patent provisions. IBM can't
deal in GPL'ed software to its customers and then ask other companies or
customers to pay patent royalties applying to that code. 

However, I think the community should keep up the pressure on IBM, HP
and the rest to address this issue -- I'm not sure what the best method
would be. It's unlikely that they would issue any kind of blanket
indemnification, but there should be some way to reach a solution that
makes most reasonable people happy. 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net