IBM Breaks Open Source Patent Pledge

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."

Comments

Wake up and smell the stock market people...

[Assmasher]

...ANY publicly traded company will do ANYTHING to ensure the continued success of the company because the management is entirely beholden to the stock holders. Google included (although for now a large amount of the stock is in the hands of people still involved in the day to day operations.)

Some day you will be reading a story about Google 'embracing/extending/extinguishing' some new darling technology and you will realize that as soon as a company 'goes public' they lose their soul FOREVER. I'm not against publicly traded companies, I'm against the ridiculous naivete that tries to act like Microsoft is 'evil' and Google is 'good', LOL. From such a simplistic point of view, Microsoft are evil, Apple are evil, Google are evil, IBM is evil, every public company is 'evil.'

Re:Turnover

[Jurily]

Thinking like yous is what's wrong with business and politics today -- nobody thinks long-term.

For me, a long term plan involves getting a better job, and if the people at IBM think the same, there's nobody left in that company you can blame for anything that happened in 2005.