Slashdot Mirror
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."
They're as bad as Microsoft:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Duh? Did you really think that IBM was jumping on the Linux bandwagon out of anything other than to make money for themselves?
Profit is inheritly evil by definition. You have charged someone more for a good or service then it is actually worth. You can easily run a not-for-profit company or even a non-profit company. Net Profit is inheritly evil by the definition of charging someone more then something is worth. In that regard how much is enough? It's never enough once you go past the real value.
Widget A: Cost $30 dollars (labor, materials, overhead, etc.)
Sell A for $30 and you are honest.
Sell A for $40 and you are overcharging by $10.
"But without profit you cannot grow."
Then you ask, "How much is enough?"
It's never enough once you cross the profit line. The whole usury debate has been going on for over 4000 years and the nature of profit in morality.
Profit is at it's core, evil in that sense. The question rages on, how much evil are you will to tolerate in order to stay ahead of the competition.
It's always a race to the bottom of the morality ladder. Ethics is nothing more then a series of rules a business tells people they play by until they become inconvienent.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Why bother? There is no value to simply reiterating my original post, and nothing I said was effectively rebutted.