IBM Breaks Open Source Patent Pledge 359
Jay Maynard writes "IBM has broken the pledge it made in 2005 not to assert 500 patents against open source software. In a letter sent to Roger Bowler, president of TurboHercules SA, IBM's Mark Anzani, head of their mainframe business, claimed that the Hercules open-source emulator (disclaimer: I manage the open source project) infringes on at least 106 issued patents and 67 more applied for. Included in that list are two that it pledged not to assert in 2005. In a blog entry, the NoSoftwarePatents campaign's Florian Mueller said that 'IBM is using patent warfare in order to protect its highly lucrative mainframe monopoly against Free and Open Source Software.' I have to agree: from where I sit, IBM likes Open Source only as long as they don't have to compete with it."
Turnover (Score:1, Insightful)
Why would anyone at IBM still remember what they said in 2005? That's ancient history.
I feel your pain (Score:5, Insightful)
So, out of 173 possible patent infringements, 2 of them were supposedly pledged to not be enforced.
I can see why you feel hard done by.
Claiming infringement (Score:1, Insightful)
Claiming infringement on a patent is not the same thing as asserting it. Yet another story blown vastly out of proportion by poor editing.
Re:Durr (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I feel your pain (Score:4, Insightful)
At least they listed the patents. That more than can be said about other companies (see also: Microsoft).
hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Not like you'd have any bias here or anything...
Re:I feel your pain (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bet IBM will apologize for accidentally listing the 2 patents that it swore it would not.
This will leave the creator with 171 patent infringements and nothing to complain about to slashdot.
Look, IBM is losing it anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
They have shipped so many jobs overseas that they have stopped saying how many jobs they are shipping overseas. Like Microsoft (and others), they are probably very close to dropping below 50% american employees.
Like all large corporations (including Google), they will do evil to make money. They just don't care any more. They are usually strong enough to put the government off indefinitely or are willing to pay a small fine to make a large profit.
So they are open source friendly if it makes them money, and not if it loses them money.
They are not your friend. As the VB developers found out a few years ago, they'll dump you with no upgrade path if it makes financial sense to do so.
IBM does some good stuff (Eclipse) but they are not your friend.
Obviousness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Durr (Score:5, Insightful)
...who wouldn't like to invest time and money to create something, then have to turn around and compete against someone who basically just copies it and gives it away?
When you say "copies it", do you mean "ctrl-c, ctrl-v" or "re-engineer from scratch"? If you mean the former, that's a serious accusation, and you need to back it up. What part of their work was electronically copied? If you mean the latter, then so what? Do you really mean to imply that people have the right to distribute ideas and yet still own them? Do you think the descendants of some cave-man should be getting royalties for every combustion engine that internally uses fire? Yes, we should like it when people improve on our ideas. And yes, doing something in open source is a significant improvement (perhaps sometimes even if it's not quite as good).
Re:I feel your pain (Score:4, Insightful)
They will probably do that anyway, because it needlessly complicates their case if they don't--- apart from the PR value, suing someone for patent infringement after you've openly pledged not to assert the patent against them will make enforcing the patent in court harder, since it can be argued to be an implied royalty-free license, or at least to trigger estoppel.
Re:FLOSS to hurt competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like multiple personalities.
One side drives a lot of open source projects.
Another side has lots of IP, and says, gosh, we're gonna lose $$ if you use that mainframe emulator. (opens big box of patents) Now it's time to scare you off this mission of yours. Go home.(whilst waving the IP like it's a magic sword)
Look, IBM, you can't have it both ways. Wanna be a friend? Great. Want to wave your IP portfolio like the usual corporate hoodlum/troll? We'll walk.
Figure it out. Much is riding on whether we walk away from you.... or not. Microsoft's blustering is enough..... we can put you in the same boat-- where you were, years ago.
Re:Master the Mainframe (Score:4, Insightful)
Couldn't be that a company as large as IBM might have multiple departments/divisions that don't really know what the other is doing. Nope just an evil corporation being hypercritical.
Re:Durr (Score:5, Insightful)
That surprises me, who wouldn't like to invest time and money to create something, then have to turn around and compete against someone who basically just copies it and gives it away?
No time and money was invested in creating at least one of the patents. For example, look at one of the "infringed" patents, US Patent 7254698. The claims are merely a "shopping list" or "marketing glossy" of the peculiar feature of an ALU, which happens to be installed in a particular mainframe, that the Hercules guys would like to emulate:
Does multiply/add and multiply/subtract
Five deep pipeline, one result per cycle
binary or hex floating point format
Works on two different architecture formats.
It would take about a minute to make a spreadsheet in Excel that theoretically infringes on that patent, and probably an hour or so to make a perfect replica. Really all you need to do is implement mX+b=y with a five deep stack/array, given some peculiar input and output formats.
Now IBM will sell you a circuit board circa 2001-ish that will do this. They spent all their effort making an expensive machine that implements these simple math ideas in silicon. No one is stealing their physical hardware, or blueprints, or VHDL/Verilog, etc etc.
The emulator merely does the same calculations in C, and its free.
It boils down to IBM saying "no emulating our exact instruction set"
One ethical problem with patents like 7254698, aside from obvious ones like trying to patent basic linear algebra equations, is the supporting docs are all from 1999 to 2001 ish era. But its doing the submarine thing in that it was not issued until August 7 2007, "around a decade" after they were shipping silicon, more or less, sort of. And it won't expire until around 2023 which in the computer field is an absolute eternity.
I will give IBM credit, that unlike a patent troll, they actually built silicon to do something, not just patented an idea. But not much credit.
I have not looked into all hundred+ patents but they're probably all very similar to this one, but for other parts of the CPU instruction set.
Re:FLOSS to hurt competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
not multiple personalities, different departments.
PR and the legal department are always in contradiction. Upper Management is usually states agreement with PR but other management just follows the legal requirements only. Guess which one speaks out usually?
Well (Score:3, Insightful)
"To think some uppity pesant thinks he can do as he pleases without our permission. The arrogance." - Excerpt from a trial in England from roughly the 12th century about some pesant butchering his chickens to feed his family and the land owner getting pissed because of some crap about getting 1/3rd the flock...(at least that's what I have scribbled in my old college notebook.)
Freedom long died when the US stopped exporting stuff and tried exporting ideas. The fact is the only thing the US largely exports is Intellectual Property. Does the whole Copyright\Patent fiasco not point that out?
Open Source is the largest economical threat to the US economy and it will only get worse. Wait till the corporations starts shipping everything offshore to extort more draconian Intellectual Property laws... oh wait...
In the end it is a pyhric victory. The businesses are now being choked by their own intellectual property crusade (see patent troll) and now that the genie is out of the bottle it is a race to the bottom until, like the dark ages few have a monopoly on thought itself by restricting who can read what. It took Gutenberg's heresy to end the dark ages in many ways...
IBM is trapped and now, and walks to a self-defeat that cannot be avoided. The 3rd world, which is soundly grounded in practical needs (food, water, shelter) cares little for the nonsense of imaginary property and simply see information as something free to share to get out of poverty. Those minds grow while those trapped in intellectual tyranny narrow.
IBM, it's a lose-lose either way. Might as well try to be the biggest IP hoarder around.
That's what it really is now, a crisis (intellectual) and hoarding mentality.
You're missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that this particular case has 173 patent infringements, and 2 were ones IBM promised not to use so the project is pooched anyways. That's not it at all. Sure - the end result is the same for this Hercules emulator but that's not the point.
The point is IBM said they wouldn't use these patents against open source projects, and just did. Therefore the 500 or so patents that they claim are off limits to open source obviously aren't. Their promise is useless because now we know that as soon as it is expedient they will use these patents against open source.
In other words this Hercules emulator is merely the litmus test for IBM's open source patent promise, with lousy (but sadly typical) results.
Re:Turnover (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone at IBM still remember what they said in 2005? That's ancient history.
Five years is ancient history? What grade are you in, son? IBM started business in 1885 [wikipedia.org]. THAT'S ancient history. Thinking like yous is what's wrong with business and politics today -- nobody thinks long-term.
Re:IBM were always against us (Score:3, Insightful)
It was always amusing to see how much people bought into IBM's bullshit. IBM as a company never cared about the ideals of free software nor the GNU manifesto. They saw Linux and other open source software as something they could leverage in order to sell more of their proprietary hardware.
Re:FLOSS to hurt competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
A shot across the bow is a bad thing, given their current position and that of people that respect FOSS. You'd think they'd have given this more thought.
Re:Claiming infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
Your comment is not so helpful unless you explain the difference. They sound like synonyms to me.
Re:Turnover (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your sarcasm detector might be faulty. Also those of at least 4 other people who modded you to +5. Might wanna get that looked at.
Re:Durr (Score:3, Insightful)
it wasn't so very long ago that reverse engineering patented stuff in a clean room environment was considered kosher. Hence the reason you're able to use a Dell, HP, or home grown PC instead of an "IBM PC IX, now with *two color* text display." (OK, so more likely you'd be using a Mac or Amiga, but it's really hard to be sure)
Re:Turnover (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why we have the legal notion of corporate personhood.
Re:IBM were always against us (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to be contrary, but why not?
Because it's scope is only to patents that apply to Linux. This doesn't stop any of the OIN members from suing the other members for non-Linux related patents such as are the vast majority of the patents in this case.
OIN licenses their patents to anyone who agrees not to assert patents against "the Linux system" (whatever that means).
And this case isn't about "the Linux system" and as such those terms don't apply.
Re:Probably an oversight or NOT FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a really important point. I'm rather surprised the patent pledge didn't include an exception for companies that sue IBM. Either way, when this company sued IBM, as far as I'm concerned, they became fair game. This isn't IBM suing an open source project. It's IBM counter-suing a company that sued them first.
Even if IBM can't use those two patents (and it's not clear if they can't, given that TurboHercules is not an open source project, but rather a company that appears to be leaching off of an open source project), it seems completely reasonable for them to use the other patents defensively in this way.
Re:TurboHercules hitting first? (Score:3, Insightful)
The CCIA is hardly a Microsoft arm. They fought against Microsoft in their EU antitrust case, and were responsible for the part of the decision that required Microsoft to make their interoperability documentation available to the Samba project.
To quote Larry Niven: "Ideas are not responsible for those who believe in them." Not even Microsoft is perfectly evil.