They're not defending copyrights, because those aren't in dispute. Nobody is saying that IBM should change the license they issue their software products under. All that anyone is asking is that they agree to license that same software on other platforms.
IBM's attack is patent-based, pure and simple. Worse, it's software patents, because if they're strictly hardware, then software can't infringe them. It's an attack on Hercules itself, simply because that's what TurboHercules SAS is using. They may be trying to spin it as a commercial dispute, but it's like shooting someone at close range with an elephant rifle: you ahve to watch where your bullet will go when it overpenetrates the target. In this case, the elephant gun is aimed at TurboHercules SAS, but it will also hit the Hercules open source project.
Your possibility 1 is the end result any opponent of monopolistic abuses and software patents should be arguing for. You're wrong, though, in that IBM does indeed have something to gain - software licensing revenues with no additional work, as well as even more good PR in the open source community - and nothing to lose.
Just what did Amdahl give IBM in the days when the OS was freely available and in the public domain? IBM got *nothing* from Amdahl until they started patenting features. Now, IBM is not willing to license their patents at all in order to maintain their monopoly position, and tie the sale of their mainframe hardware to licensing of their software product - and that's just plain illegal for a monopolist.
Priced a 2098-A01 lately? By the time you add DASD, you're well over a half million bucks. The low end of the market isn't going to be able to afford that.
Read the correspondence. IBM said "you're infringing our IP" in their second letter. TurboHercules SAS merely asked them to be specific in what they were referring to.
TurboHercules SAS isn't cannibalizing IBM's customer base for one simple reason: IBM abandoned the segment of the customer base that Hercules can satisfy a long time ago. They just don't sell small mainframes any more. The z/PDT, their emulator, is only available under highly restrictive conditions that essentially rule out anything but program testing.
As for problems from emulation bugs, IBM dealt with their software running on other people's hardware for decades, and know how to do it. The support requirements are simple: a software bug must first be demonstrated on IBM hardware before it is considered to be a bug IBM has to fix. That's the way it's always worked, and TurboHercules SAS understands and accepts that.
TurboHercules SAS is not asking IBM to go to any other license for their software. They're only asking that it be licensed to run on non-IBM hardware, just as they did for decades.
IBM's attack on TurboHercules SAS is a patent attack, and since TurboHercules SAS's code is the open source Hercules emulator, that makes it a patent attack on open source software. What's so hard to understand about this?
PJ didn't debunk it at all. Only her fanboys think she did.
She ignores facts and twists words, taking things out of context, just to make IBM look good in whatever it is they're doing. She did it to me repeatedly before throwing me off the site entirely.
I started my own blog to post the parts of the story that PJ ignores or twists out of any recognizable shape.
PJ's done a lot of admirable work in the IBM vs. SCO case, but her comments on other things reveal her as at least a rabid fangirl who thinks IBM can do no wrong. Her credibility is taking more of a hit because of it than she realizes.
And no, my long-time opposition to the GPL does not make me the enemy of open source software, no matter how loudly PJ may scream otherwise.
Lots of folks use Firefox on OS X and are happy with it, so your tip will indeed be useful.
I say Firefox is a half-assed OS X app because it doesn't use OS X visual elements and doesn't follow OS X conventions. I have it on my system and use it for the occasional site that chokes on Safari. I'd use it more if it simply looked and felt like every other OS X app on my system.
I'd all but given up on going to articles from here because I hate those annoying multipage articles that have maybe one screenful of text and five screenfuls of ads. If Safari Reader works as advertised, I can go back to reading again.
Actually, the chair can vote under Robert's Rules of Order when his vote will affect the result. On a vote requiring a majority, he can vote to break a tie or create one; on a 2/3 vote, he can vote to give the question a 2/3 margin, or prevent it from having one; and so on. See Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised 10th edition, pages 392-393 for the discussion.
There's a much easier way to know whether a 2/3 vote has passed: There must be at least twice as many votes in favor as there are opposed. 136-70 fails. 137-69 fails. 138-68 passes. This matches up with the real math, since you can't have a fraction of a vote (in the normal case), so in order to get 137-1/3 votes, you must have 138.
The market isn't servers, though. It's legacy computing systems. When a user can't economically migrate, then they're stuck in the mainframe world - and that makes it a market unto itself. If you can't migrate because to do so would destroy your business, then it's beyond "extremely expensive".
That ended several years ago. Fujitsu/Amdahl exited the mainframe market not long after z/Architecture became available. They never resold IBM hardware; they built their own, and decided that the market couldn't justify the expense they'd incur trying to keep up plus the patent royalties IBM was demanding.
There are zero platform choices available to someone who can't spend hundreds of millions to get rid of their mainframes. They are locked in, due entirely to IBM's actions. If a company makes decisions based on there being competition in the market, and then one company eliminates the competition, that's monopolistic tactics.
Not really. Mainframe customers incur enormous expense and effort when trying to move off of the mainframe platform, and such projects fail as often as not. That's what makes IBM's tying of z/OS to their hardware an illegal monopolistic tactic: because they own 100% of the relevant market.
Fortune 25 companies are not known for being stupid when it comes to cutting costs - and every single one of them is an IBM mainframe user. The vendor lockin is not because of their contracts with their users, but because they have no competition in the mainframe space.
They can't kill off Hercules by buying it. That's what makes this case different from the companies they have bought up.
They can certainly buy me (I do have my price - else I wouldn't have appeared in Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaign), but that would merely inconvenience the project, and that not all that much. I'd be more than happy to go to work for IBM supporting Hercules. Somehow, though, I consider that as only slightly more likely than winning tonight's Powerball jackpot.
The IBM mainframes have always been defined so that details like that are not visible to programs, and programs that depend on timing like that are not only allowed, but expected, to break on other systems. Hercules makes no attempt at all to emulate the behavior of an IBM mainframe to that degree, and does not need to to fulfill its purpose.
I refuse to hold myself responsible for what Maureen O'Gara thinks.
The purpose of the emulator and the open source project that's sprung up around it is not to allow people to migrate off the mainframe, or to allow people to pirate IBM software, or any other nefarious purpose that IBM or its shills (like the one who accused Hercules of existing to pirate software earlier in the comments) might wish to assign to it.The purpose of the open source project is to build an emulator that is as close to the behavior of the actual iron, and have it be correct, reliable, portable, and fast, in that order, so that its users can do whatever they wish with it. Our users have many different reasons for running it, many if not most of them legal and permissible, but in the end, it's up to the user to use the system in a legal way.
TurboHercules SAS's purpose is to make money from services and support related to Hercules. That's always been acceptable for a company to do int he open source world, even to the likes of RMS.
You may or may not care about Hercules, but do you care about software patents and their chilling effect on the world of open source software? If so, then you should care what happens to Hercules.
The GPL doesn't require you to do any such thing for your own code. If, however, you modify someone else's GPLed code, you must respect the license they chose. You may not like this but don't complain that a lot of others do. It's their code and they have the same right as you to license their work as they see fit.
They have that right, and I have mine, just as I have my right to express my opposition to the terms of their license. I find the GPL sufficiently intolerable that I refuse to work on GPLd code; if someone wants to control my work that badly, they don't deserve to have it.
As the old adage goes, you are known by the company you keep.
O'Gara and Mueller are not friends of open source regardless of how they pose their arguments in your favor. My goal is to do what's best for open source software. Their goal seems to be to destroy open source software. If they are for you, something stinks. It may not be your fault but something stinks.
Nobody's wrong 100% of the time. To argue against the person rather than the argument is a classic fallacy. Besides, as I note below, Eric Raymond makes the same arguments, and I am pleased and proud that he has done so, not only because I am proud to be able to call him friend, but also because I know - as does anyone who knows him at all - that he wouldn't make those arguments if he didn't passionately believe him. Whatever else you can say about him, you cannot accuse him of being an enemy of open source.
I support any FOSS license that does not attempt to tell others what they may do with their own code, as the GPL does and as no other license does. The code I write for my own use is generally released under the MIT/X/new BSD license.
As for the attacks on the messengers, why should we let IBM divert attention away from their own actions? The signature on that letter is Mark Anzani, not Maureen O'Gara or Florian Mueller. Is the goal here to slam Microsoft just because IBM gave people a sliver of an opening to do so? Or is the goal to protect open source software from the threat of software patents?
IBM's original pledge said that the pledge was not valid if the other party initiated legal proceedings against open source software. TurboHercules has not done so and will not do so. Therefore, your hypothetical doesn't apply.
That I oppose the GPL does not mean I oppose FOSS. That would be downright silly of me, since I manage the open source project at the center of this discussion. I have opposed the GPL for better than two decades now, and continue to do so - but that's an opposition to the specific license, not the community at large.
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They're not defending copyrights, because those aren't in dispute. Nobody is saying that IBM should change the license they issue their software products under. All that anyone is asking is that they agree to license that same software on other platforms.
IBM's attack is patent-based, pure and simple. Worse, it's software patents, because if they're strictly hardware, then software can't infringe them. It's an attack on Hercules itself, simply because that's what TurboHercules SAS is using. They may be trying to spin it as a commercial dispute, but it's like shooting someone at close range with an elephant rifle: you ahve to watch where your bullet will go when it overpenetrates the target. In this case, the elephant gun is aimed at TurboHercules SAS, but it will also hit the Hercules open source project.
Your possibility 1 is the end result any opponent of monopolistic abuses and software patents should be arguing for. You're wrong, though, in that IBM does indeed have something to gain - software licensing revenues with no additional work, as well as even more good PR in the open source community - and nothing to lose.
Just what did Amdahl give IBM in the days when the OS was freely available and in the public domain? IBM got *nothing* from Amdahl until they started patenting features. Now, IBM is not willing to license their patents at all in order to maintain their monopoly position, and tie the sale of their mainframe hardware to licensing of their software product - and that's just plain illegal for a monopolist.
Priced a 2098-A01 lately? By the time you add DASD, you're well over a half million bucks. The low end of the market isn't going to be able to afford that.
Read the correspondence. IBM said "you're infringing our IP" in their second letter. TurboHercules SAS merely asked them to be specific in what they were referring to.
TurboHercules SAS isn't cannibalizing IBM's customer base for one simple reason: IBM abandoned the segment of the customer base that Hercules can satisfy a long time ago. They just don't sell small mainframes any more. The z/PDT, their emulator, is only available under highly restrictive conditions that essentially rule out anything but program testing.
As for problems from emulation bugs, IBM dealt with their software running on other people's hardware for decades, and know how to do it. The support requirements are simple: a software bug must first be demonstrated on IBM hardware before it is considered to be a bug IBM has to fix. That's the way it's always worked, and TurboHercules SAS understands and accepts that.
TurboHercules SAS is not asking IBM to go to any other license for their software. They're only asking that it be licensed to run on non-IBM hardware, just as they did for decades.
IBM's attack on TurboHercules SAS is a patent attack, and since TurboHercules SAS's code is the open source Hercules emulator, that makes it a patent attack on open source software. What's so hard to understand about this?
PJ didn't debunk it at all. Only her fanboys think she did.
She ignores facts and twists words, taking things out of context, just to make IBM look good in whatever it is they're doing. She did it to me repeatedly before throwing me off the site entirely.
I started my own blog to post the parts of the story that PJ ignores or twists out of any recognizable shape.
PJ's done a lot of admirable work in the IBM vs. SCO case, but her comments on other things reveal her as at least a rabid fangirl who thinks IBM can do no wrong. Her credibility is taking more of a hit because of it than she realizes.
And no, my long-time opposition to the GPL does not make me the enemy of open source software, no matter how loudly PJ may scream otherwise.
Lots of folks use Firefox on OS X and are happy with it, so your tip will indeed be useful.
I say Firefox is a half-assed OS X app because it doesn't use OS X visual elements and doesn't follow OS X conventions. I have it on my system and use it for the occasional site that chokes on Safari. I'd use it more if it simply looked and felt like every other OS X app on my system.
I'll use Firefox when it quits being a half-assed OS X app.
I'd all but given up on going to articles from here because I hate those annoying multipage articles that have maybe one screenful of text and five screenfuls of ads. If Safari Reader works as advertised, I can go back to reading again.
Actually, the chair can vote under Robert's Rules of Order when his vote will affect the result. On a vote requiring a majority, he can vote to break a tie or create one; on a 2/3 vote, he can vote to give the question a 2/3 margin, or prevent it from having one; and so on. See Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised 10th edition, pages 392-393 for the discussion.
There's a much easier way to know whether a 2/3 vote has passed: There must be at least twice as many votes in favor as there are opposed. 136-70 fails. 137-69 fails. 138-68 passes. This matches up with the real math, since you can't have a fraction of a vote (in the normal case), so in order to get 137-1/3 votes, you must have 138.
This answer brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Professional Registered Parliamentarian member of the National Association of Parliamentarians.
The market isn't servers, though. It's legacy computing systems. When a user can't economically migrate, then they're stuck in the mainframe world - and that makes it a market unto itself. If you can't migrate because to do so would destroy your business, then it's beyond "extremely expensive".
That ended several years ago. Fujitsu/Amdahl exited the mainframe market not long after z/Architecture became available. They never resold IBM hardware; they built their own, and decided that the market couldn't justify the expense they'd incur trying to keep up plus the patent royalties IBM was demanding.
There are zero platform choices available to someone who can't spend hundreds of millions to get rid of their mainframes. They are locked in, due entirely to IBM's actions. If a company makes decisions based on there being competition in the market, and then one company eliminates the competition, that's monopolistic tactics.
Not really. Mainframe customers incur enormous expense and effort when trying to move off of the mainframe platform, and such projects fail as often as not. That's what makes IBM's tying of z/OS to their hardware an illegal monopolistic tactic: because they own 100% of the relevant market.
Fortune 25 companies are not known for being stupid when it comes to cutting costs - and every single one of them is an IBM mainframe user. The vendor lockin is not because of their contracts with their users, but because they have no competition in the mainframe space.
They can't kill off Hercules by buying it. That's what makes this case different from the companies they have bought up.
They can certainly buy me (I do have my price - else I wouldn't have appeared in Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaign), but that would merely inconvenience the project, and that not all that much. I'd be more than happy to go to work for IBM supporting Hercules. Somehow, though, I consider that as only slightly more likely than winning tonight's Powerball jackpot.
The IBM mainframes have always been defined so that details like that are not visible to programs, and programs that depend on timing like that are not only allowed, but expected, to break on other systems. Hercules makes no attempt at all to emulate the behavior of an IBM mainframe to that degree, and does not need to to fulfill its purpose.
I refuse to hold myself responsible for what Maureen O'Gara thinks.
The purpose of the emulator and the open source project that's sprung up around it is not to allow people to migrate off the mainframe, or to allow people to pirate IBM software, or any other nefarious purpose that IBM or its shills (like the one who accused Hercules of existing to pirate software earlier in the comments) might wish to assign to it.The purpose of the open source project is to build an emulator that is as close to the behavior of the actual iron, and have it be correct, reliable, portable, and fast, in that order, so that its users can do whatever they wish with it. Our users have many different reasons for running it, many if not most of them legal and permissible, but in the end, it's up to the user to use the system in a legal way.
TurboHercules SAS's purpose is to make money from services and support related to Hercules. That's always been acceptable for a company to do int he open source world, even to the likes of RMS.
You may or may not care about Hercules, but do you care about software patents and their chilling effect on the world of open source software? If so, then you should care what happens to Hercules.
The GPL doesn't require you to do any such thing for your own code. If, however, you modify someone else's GPLed code, you must respect the license they chose. You may not like this but don't complain that a lot of others do. It's their code and they have the same right as you to license their work as they see fit.
They have that right, and I have mine, just as I have my right to express my opposition to the terms of their license. I find the GPL sufficiently intolerable that I refuse to work on GPLd code; if someone wants to control my work that badly, they don't deserve to have it.
As the old adage goes, you are known by the company you keep.
O'Gara and Mueller are not friends of open source regardless of how they pose their arguments in your favor. My goal is to do what's best for open source software. Their goal seems to be to destroy open source software. If they are for you, something stinks. It may not be your fault but something stinks.
Nobody's wrong 100% of the time. To argue against the person rather than the argument is a classic fallacy. Besides, as I note below, Eric Raymond makes the same arguments, and I am pleased and proud that he has done so, not only because I am proud to be able to call him friend, but also because I know - as does anyone who knows him at all - that he wouldn't make those arguments if he didn't passionately believe him. Whatever else you can say about him, you cannot accuse him of being an enemy of open source.
Is Eric Raymond a Microsoft shill? He's come out against IBM's threat, as well.
I support any FOSS license that does not attempt to tell others what they may do with their own code, as the GPL does and as no other license does. The code I write for my own use is generally released under the MIT/X/new BSD license.
As for the attacks on the messengers, why should we let IBM divert attention away from their own actions? The signature on that letter is Mark Anzani, not Maureen O'Gara or Florian Mueller. Is the goal here to slam Microsoft just because IBM gave people a sliver of an opening to do so? Or is the goal to protect open source software from the threat of software patents?
IBM's original pledge said that the pledge was not valid if the other party initiated legal proceedings against open source software. TurboHercules has not done so and will not do so. Therefore, your hypothetical doesn't apply.
That I oppose the GPL does not mean I oppose FOSS. That would be downright silly of me, since I manage the open source project at the center of this discussion. I have opposed the GPL for better than two decades now, and continue to do so - but that's an opposition to the specific license, not the community at large.
Regardless of the reason for the attack, it's still a patent attack on open source software, and that's the reason for the controversy.