The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...
The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.
But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.
That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules and NEON Enterprise Software.
This is clearly either Duden, or Berlitz. Because of the language-learning side, I'm leaning towards Berlitz, but it's not the first one that came to mind.
Duden belongs to the publishing group I meant (Langenscheidt).
There's definitely some truth in that. One thing that especially strategy games can teach is to deal with resource constraints and to strike a balance between the different objectives that must be pursued, especially a balance between short-term defensive action and the pursuit of mid-term to long-term strategic goals.
I first heard a manager say this in December 1995. He was one of my business contacts and around that time became VP Sales & Marketing of Germany's largest publisher of dictionaries and language-learning materials. I had done some work on the German version of Warcraft II - Tides of Darkness (PR, marketing, sales, and translation; got listed twice in the game's credits) and I gave copies to business partners like the person I just mentioned. He became addicted to it and told me that when his wife criticized him for spending so much time on the thing, he explained to her that this was basically like management training:-)
At the time computer games weren't online, so except for those who went to "LAN parties" with other gamers, gameplay was a solo mission. Now one can actually practice leadership and diplomacy. But even just the virtual resource management challenge of a game like Warcraft II has value in itself.
When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects:-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
Except that Apple has no monopoly. It has a high market share. That is a different thing entirely. Apple doesn't use that market share to lock people into its products. There are lots of competing products that are good solid competitors in any of its markets. You can use competing products with any of its products.
That is a traditional antitrust reasoning but apparently the EU has realized that the market can't take care of itself unless interoperability is ensured.
[...] gaming consoles, including Microsoft's offerings. But of course Florian you always defend Microsoft.
I don't know who told you that. Whoever told it to you will certainly not have been able to substantiate this claim because I simply don't do that. I talk about certain issues facing the IT sector regardless of which companies present them. On my blog I have written negatively about a Microsoft FAT patent and a court decision to uphold it; my blog links (in the righthand column) to a couple of websites that criticize Microsoft very aggressively; I linked to TechRights.org several times, a website known for linking about everything in the world to Microsoft but sometimes they do come up with interesting stuff; I mentioned Microsoft' lobbying for EU patent reform in a list of company names that started with IBM and them (and was quoted directly from an FFII presentation)
; I mentioned Microsoft's lobbying (alongside IBM) for software patents in New Zealand, etc.
What I do have to recognize is that things I thought and said five or six years that Microsoft would do concerning patents and open source haven't happened. In the meantime there was the European court decision on the antitrust case and there have been other dynamics in the industry. That doesn't mean that their patents aren't a potential future threat, but there's no clear and present danger while IBM and Apple use patents against open source in ways that are really meant to shut out competition (Microsoft simply doesn't do that with patents, at least not at this stage; they want to do licensing deals but leave people in business). So I don't even defend them because there's simply nothing that they do concerning the assertion of patents against open source that poses a problem (again: that's the way it is now, but I can't substitute my past assumptions for today's reality if I want to be reasonable and facts-based).
Concerning the significant market players interoperability initiative, that's not antitrust where you have a case of companies A, B and C vs. company D. This is about legislation. The law that will come out of the process will apply to every significant player equally. There won't be a Microsoft carve-out in it, nor an Apple or IBM or whatever carve-out. Especially not since Mrs. Kroes is in charge. So let's hope we get a set of really good rules that everyone, including but not limited to Microsoft, will have to comply with.
Do the various "services" have to be able to communicate with any kind of "IT product"?
I haven't asked the commissioner but even without doing so I have no doubt that she meant this both ways. Interoperability goes both ways. The only problem is that obviously some companies in the industry want it as a one-way street: others have to open up, they stay closed. I can't imagine a piece of legislation would be one-way. Even if some companies tried to lobby for one-way rules, I don't think they'd get very far.
What's more likely is that the rules may only apply to certain segments of the diverse IT market. But again, within the scope of the rules I can't imagine there would be anything other than quid pro quo, give and take on equal terms.
The EU can't formally legislate on what companies are allowed to do in the US market, but in practical terms, we're talking about a global market for IT products and (especially) Internet-based services. If vendors wanted to apply a different set of openness and interoperability standards in the US than in the EU, they would have to make a lot of efforts to keep the markets separated. They can do it, such as by refusing connections from certain sets of IP addresses, but it would be a major hassle. If many vendors did so, lawmakers in the US would also take a closer look and might consider a similar initiative to benefit customers in their own country.
Concerning Microsoft, the new law isn't even needed for them because they were already subjected to two antitrust proceedings in the EU on the grounds of being found dominant. More importantly, I'm not aware of them treating the US market any differently concerning interoperability with Samba than they treat the EU, even though it was only a European ruling.
The biggest benefit of the envisioned new EU law is that similar rules would also have to be respected by companies who may just not be close enough to a monopolist so that antitrust law can deal with them, but who are powerful enough (such as Apple, Adobe etc.) that it's a problem if they get away with too closed an approach. I don't mean to blame those companies for simply trying to maximize shareholder value or for adhering to certain closed philosophies -- but if antitrust law can't change their behavior, a new instrument is needed.
I wish I could agree that the ruling is at least a draw, but unfortunately I can't. It clearly favors an expansive patent system, assuming that new technologies must fall within the scope of patentable subject matter unless there's legislation that sets limits (mentioned in this analysis, for an example). Such legislation is a long shot to say the least, given the lobbying power of all those favoring software patents.
Through my work on the NoSoftwarePatents campaign (which I founded and managed until 2005) I spent a lot of time with patent experts and policy-makers, so when I read a reasoning like the one in the Bilski case, I can tell when an expansive view prevails over a restrictive one. There's really nothing in the ruling (apart from minority opinions that don't really matter for the future) suggesting in any way that the Supreme Court might do away with software patents. In fact, the ruling made it clear that even straightforward business method patents aren't an endangered species for the time being, unless they're just too abstract, such as the Bilski application.
The IEEE may consider itself and its most influential members to be among those who gain from the Bilski ruling and software patents, but here's my top ten list of losers:
It was kind of surprising to see on Twitter that not only open source advocates such as Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Brian Proffitt considered that list a good summary but also ACT, a lobby organization that supports software patents all the way (we lobbied against each other several times). But ACT pointed out that they didn't agree with all I wrote. That didn't surprise me.
After all, you were buying into the whole bullshit of "when a user is deleted their comments are assigned to the anonymous user it must be a plot", which indicates someone who is incredibly naive when it comes to managing linked lists (which is what comments are).
You confuse me for someone else because I never talked about that issue of comments assigned to anonymous users...
Again, nothing nefarious. This is an anti-spam provision. Spammer posts some spam, you delete it, but because it's tied to an IP, when they go to check up on their spam, it's "still there" so they don't re-post over and over and over. Then, because their spam apparently is bringing 0 results, they go elsewhere.
The material I have received from multiple sources independently of each other indicates that they don't block "spammers" but simply people they disagree with.
I am increasingly inclined to expose them for what they are, and to shed some light on other issues concerning them than just this one. This behavior is consistent with an overall approach that instead of digging for truth attempts to suppress the truth in a wide variety of ways.
Yep, Groklaw apparently have a habit of blocking commenters whose opinions disagree with the site's viewpoints. This has a few interesting aspects. Firstly, [...] Secondly, [...] Thirdly, [...].
Thank you for this information. I have heard this from several independdent sources, some of which have documented it with screenshots and sent them to me. I would like to ask you to also send me your information and material. I can't promise that I will publish it, and if I do so, I can't promise when, but there is a possibility that I will expose Groklaw for the propaganda tool that it is.
I received some stuff in reply to another call on the community, on this page of my blog. You can find an email address there that I don't check extremely frequently, but I do read everything that gets sent there.
There are ever more indications that Groklaw indeed blocks people simply for disagreement, without justification under a resaonable standard such as promotion of commercial websites, offensive or off-topic content. That's what sets them apart from how unbiased websites operate and raises serious questions even concerning Groklaw's purpose. It certainly doesn't detract from concerns some others have previously had about Groklaw.
Here are some quotes from my analysis (I'm the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign):
"Unfortunately, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion that doesn't help the cause of partial or complete abolition of software patents at all."
"[T]he court's majority position is about the most liberal reasoning that it could have been. Only a decision to uphold the Bilski patent could have been any less restrictive.
"The decision announced today makes it clear that a majority of the Supreme Court wanted to give the abolition of even only a small percentage of all software patents the widest berth possible."
"This US decision is even more disappointing when taking into account the global trend." [then mentions political process in New Zealand and court decision in Germany]
"The position that software patents should be abolished isn't nearly as popular among judges and politicians as it is in the free and open source software community."
The upcoming Defensive Patent License (DPL) is recommended at the end of the blog posting.
tomhudson, you should be careful about accusing others of lying when they simply disagree with you. Concerning your first "FACT": of course IBM has asserted the patents. For a definition of "to assert", here's a link.
You've claimed that IBM has attacked Hercules. They have not.
I've explained this in multiple comments here and you can also read the views of the maintainer of the Hercules open source project on his blog.
PJ has consistently argued in favour of people being required to respect legal licenses
That's always my position. In addition, there's antitrust law, which can be used against unreasonable conditions in license agreements imposed by dominant players. I assume you supported the EU's case against Microsoft, at least philosophically, didn't you? In that case this is the same legal concept.
Your call for IBM to be required to issue a license on a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis" is an indirect attack on the restrictions of the GPL. Compulsory licensing of GPL code for closed-source software can be supported using the same flawed "logic". We don't want to go down that road again!
If z/OS were available on GPL terms, the four freedoms would take care of the legitimate interests of customers and antitrust intervention wouldn't be needed.
What you write about the license is just wrong because the patents IBM brought into play are patents that either read, if IBM's assertion was correct, also on the Hercules open source emulator (even if you just run z/Linux on it) or they don't do it ever. But here's something else you brought up:
Your actions wrt the Sun/Oracle deal made you into a joke. If you want to blame anyone for your current troll status, look in the mirror.
Seriously - thinking you could troll slashdot? Home of the trolls? Not. Going. To. Happen. Especially not when most users think you owe everyone an apology for the crap you pulled wrt Sun/Oracle.
I don't "troll" slashdot. Before there were calls on Groklaw to come over and use mod points, several of my comments here (related to the same article) had a 4-5 and Insightful/Interesting rating. That shows independent, unbiased people considered them useful contributions to the discussion (whether or not they agreed with my views is another question, but they recognized the fact that I made civilized, facts-based, on-topic comments.
Now concerning Oracle/Sun, I quoted your two unspecified references above. What is there that you believe I owe anyone an apology for? If you're more specific, then I can clarify. In my opinion that's unrelated to IBM's wrongdoings anyway, but since you see a connection, could you please explain?
You claim that TurboHercules can be attacked with patents that Hercules (the open source project, and TurboHercules uses nothing else in terms of emulation software) allegedly infringes.
The patents have nothing to do with z/OS. Should they read on Hercules in conjunction with z/OS, then they would also also read on it in conjunction with z/Linux.
You should respect the open source principle of free distribution. Both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition perfectly allow what TurboHercules does. Open source companies are an essential part of the open source ecosystem. What you say would mean that if someone asserted patents that allegedly read on Linux against Red Hat and Novell, this wouldn't mean to assert htem against Linux or open source because those are just simply companies. But it doesn't work that way. The Open Source Initiative even encourages commercialization of the very kind that TurboHercules does.
groklaw is a moderated site;
as such, it is expected that comments that don't conform to the site's standards will be removed; most sites, including slashdot, will remove certain types of comments.
I didn't say that they can't remove comments. The question is what standards they apply. If those standards are reasonable and only unreasonable comments get removed, that's one thing. Should any evidence of perfectly resaonable comments being removed ever come up, it would add to concerns over the site's bias and validate some people's impression that it's a propaganda tool. That's why it's interesting to look at.
What's in it for you?
I don't do FUD. I have given a "mission statement" to TechRights who reported on one of Groklaw's recent attacks against me. Here's what I told TechRights: "Of course there are issues, including in the OIN context, where I personally have fears, uncertainty and doubts, and there are reasons for it. That does not make “FUD” my agenda. Instead, my agenda with the FOSS Patents blog is to provide information that (i) helps FOSS developers, distributors and users identify, avoid and deal with patent-related problems and (ii) puts a spotlight on ulterior motives and hypocrisy on the part of false friends of Free and Open Source Software. A long time ago I thought Groklaw shared the first goal. But by writing that IBM is free to sue the pants off TurboHercules, PJ has unfortunately shown that her agenda is different."
I would much prefer to look at all of this from a common sense point of view but if others bring up terminology issues, then so be it and let's talk about them in that case.
simply gloss over the fact that the whole pledge was only about a small subset of the tens of thousands of patents that IBM has.
I criticized the useless quantity of patents covered by the pledge on the very day when it was announced, five and a half years ago. Here's one example of many articles that quoted me that day. Later that same year, I wrote a whole article here on/. in which I explained that those pledges are useless.
Yes, I know one or two of the patents listed on the pledge were on the list of 150 or so sent by Mr Anzani. Somehow I doubt that if they were not there it would make the slightest bit of difference in your statements.
By the way, any comparison to Google in their approach to patents is meaningless anyway. Google is primarily in the advertising business. IBM is mostly in the intellectual property business.
I've seen a whole more innovation from Google over the last 12 years than from IBM during that same period. Patent experts actually consider Microsoft's innovation much more valuable than IBM's patent-everything-under-the-sun-approach, as I mention in this blog posting on IBM's patent portfolio and patent-related practices.
You actually do think is perfectly OK for someone to simply rip-off an investment representing of billions of dollars by investing nothing yourself, and then claim that is 'competition'.
So would you then also have claimed that Samba, the open source software that interacts with Windows Server, is also just a "rip-off" scheme against the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in its R&D? IBM supported that complaint against Microsoft in the EU. I, too, believe that the EU was right to intervene and I would have liked the EU to go even further and also deal with the software patent problem as a whole. I brought the Microsoft antitrust case up just recently in a presentation I made at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Linux and open source trade show and conference.
The lock-in is not for me to prove but for antitrust regulators and/or judges to evaluate. All of us can express views here but it will be for others to look at both sides of the argument and weigh them. This here is a forum to exchange views and some information but not to "prove" in a legal sense.
The serious people that run these shops know how to do cost/benefit analysis... they still use IBM equipment because it best meets their needs.[...] SysPlex mainframe clusters, for microsecond sync should the business have an outage of a full data center - spending millions per year "extra" to avoid $Ms/minute outages.
[...] we would still need the MF to process, with at least 5 9's reliability, the zillions of transactions per day of other people's money.
I don't deny that IBM may have some high-end hardware. But customers should have choice and they should, depending on the specifics of their business and of a given application, also have the right to opt for emulation/virtualization on Intel-based servers. For a number of use cases that's definitely a viable option. Even if you give a hundred examples here of things that you believe require high-end hardware, there are enough examples to the contrary and if IBM believs that no one would want to use emulation/virtualization of mainframe legacy code on Intel-based servers, IBM could simply give its customers that choice because it wouldn't hurt them. But they know customers want it. I didn't claim that Intel-based emulation/virtualization could replace absolutely every high-end thing that a million-dollar (or multi-million-dollar) system can do. Still, I do defend the idea that customers should have this choice. I also believe they should have the kind of choice that NEON gives them: using lower-cost coprocessors to offload workloads.
That doesn't mean to say that there can be a point where people have to accept responsibility -- but the standard to apply must be a reasonable one, not a theoretical one that doesn't reflect reality.
corrected version: That doesn't mean to say that there CAN'T...
Failure to maintain and upgrade systems is not lock-in. It is just bad management.
You can always argue someone could have taken smarter decisions or done a better job. You can say the same about anyone using Windows. But from a competition law point of view, what matters is the situation in a market in which real people -- who are imperfect, all of us -- operate. Those real people are not supposed to be milked unfairly. That doesn't mean to say that there can be a point where people have to accept responsibility -- but the standard to apply must be a reasonable one, not a theoretical one that doesn't reflect reality.
Exactly how would Hercules (or any other OSS project) solve these problems?
There are three complaints that were lodged with the EU. The one I naturally care about is the TurboHercules case because it's about free and open source software and emulation/virtualization. The T3 complaint is not known to me. About NEON some things have been written and making the use of coprocessors possible to save operating costs for z/OS software writtein in COBOL looks to me like a very reasonable option that customers should have. Concerning what (Turbo)Hercules can contribute, it clearly is a very interesting choice for many purposes and the idea of making existing ("legacy") mainframe programs run on Intel-based servers makes a lot of economic sense for a lot of purposes.
And IBM has not violated their pledge in any way. They have not sued anyone. They have not sent a cease and desist letter to anyone.
IBM's pledge didn't say "we won't sue or send cease-and-desist letters". It was a promise not to assert the relevant patents. For the difference between "assert" and "sue", please check out this blog posting. No one forced IBM to use the broad term "assert", but they did in the original pledge, so I don't think I'm asking for too much if I expect them to comply with it.
They have not even mentioned the existence of the patents to any member of the Hercules OSS project.
Roger Bowler, the founder of TurboHercules and the person to whom IBM addressed its letters, founded the Hercules open source project in 1999.
Jay Maynard, the current maintainer of the Hercules open source project but not employed by TurboHercules (if I recall correctly), interprets this correctly as an attack on the Hercules open source project.
Apart from this, it's not even a relevant point that you try to make. IBM's pledge wasn't limited to companies in any way. It was a promise not to assert those patents "against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software" and you can't sue bits and bytes, so obviously this includes companies. There can be no doubt about it because the pledge later makes reference to the scenario of another "party" (anyone but IBM) asserting its own patents against open source, and that passage clearly includes companies just as well.
The Wall Street Journal was right to ask: if TurboHercules doesn't qualify for the pledge, who does?
They have already taken all the action they need - they refused to license z/OS to run on it.
From a copyright perspective they can refuse, but from an antitrust point of view there can be restrictions on IPR owners and the way they exercise their rights. In my opinion this tying of z/OS to IBM-only hardware should be prohibited as tying based on the case law established in the EU in the original Microsoft antitrust case, based on the fact that IBM is no less dominant in the mainframe market than Microsoft was for desktop PC operating systems at the time of the decision.
Neither IBM, nor Google, nor any other company who has made a similar statement has said they would actively SUPPORT a project that they felt infringed on their IP. All they have said is that they would take a passive approach and not sue.
Google's chief lawyer said they won't "use" patents against open source. That is, like "assert", a far broader terminology than "sue", even though "use" and "sue" are anagrams.
In the 10+ years of it's existence, has IBM ever sent any member of the Hercules project a cease and desist letter? Have they ever actually (not in someone's imagination) threatened a lawsuit? No.
I explained above that (i) they had promised "not to assert" (as opposed to promising "not to sue"), and (ii) the TurboHercules company is a natural part of the Hercules community and ecosystem just like Red Hat and Novell's SuSE decision are for Linux, MySQL AB was for MySQL, etc. Should all those companies not have been included in IBM's pledge?
But you and a few others are trying to paint IBM's refusal to actively support a direct competitor as some sort of 'attack' on open source, and it is just plain dishonest.
Looking at how Google categorically dismisses it as "a bad idea" to use patents against open source, you can see that there are indeed people in the industry who share my view that the use of patents against open source is really bad stuff. I never claimed that they sued, I never claimed that they sent a formal cease-and-desi
You know how many comments PJ deleted on that last story, right?
[...]
Anyhow, actually, I personally commented quite a bit on the TH issue.[...] Not that you'd know that, however, given that she vanished half of the comments. And you can't even tell that she did it, because they'll show up for anyone from your IP, but if you visit Groklaw from elsewhere, they're gone.
Incidentally, I have proof of that in the form of screenshots, logs and quotes.
Other people told me similar stories, but I haven't looked into them in greater detail so far. My focus is really on what the major players in the industry do on the commercial side and in political terms. However, since I already have a collection of material that could be used to expose Groklaw for what it is, I'd like to ask you to send me whatever you have. I got some such material sent in reply to a different call for input, where you find an email address that I use for community input. If you send it to me, I can't promise if or when I'll actually publish it, but it doesn't hurt if I have it in stock because who knows what kinds of debates may come up in the future. Please note that I don't check that email account too frequently, but I do read what I get.
Slashdot Mirror
The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...
The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.
But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.
That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules and NEON Enterprise Software.
This is clearly either Duden, or Berlitz. Because of the language-learning side, I'm leaning towards Berlitz, but it's not the first one that came to mind.
Duden belongs to the publishing group I meant (Langenscheidt).
There's definitely some truth in that. One thing that especially strategy games can teach is to deal with resource constraints and to strike a balance between the different objectives that must be pursued, especially a balance between short-term defensive action and the pursuit of mid-term to long-term strategic goals.
I first heard a manager say this in December 1995. He was one of my business contacts and around that time became VP Sales & Marketing of Germany's largest publisher of dictionaries and language-learning materials. I had done some work on the German version of Warcraft II - Tides of Darkness (PR, marketing, sales, and translation; got listed twice in the game's credits) and I gave copies to business partners like the person I just mentioned. He became addicted to it and told me that when his wife criticized him for spending so much time on the thing, he explained to her that this was basically like management training :-)
At the time computer games weren't online, so except for those who went to "LAN parties" with other gamers, gameplay was a solo mission. Now one can actually practice leadership and diplomacy. But even just the virtual resource management challenge of a game like Warcraft II has value in itself.
When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects :-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
Except that Apple has no monopoly. It has a high market share. That is a different thing entirely. Apple doesn't use that market share to lock people into its products. There are lots of competing products that are good solid competitors in any of its markets. You can use competing products with any of its products.
That is a traditional antitrust reasoning but apparently the EU has realized that the market can't take care of itself unless interoperability is ensured.
[...] gaming consoles, including Microsoft's offerings. But of course Florian you always defend Microsoft.
I don't know who told you that. Whoever told it to you will certainly not have been able to substantiate this claim because I simply don't do that. I talk about certain issues facing the IT sector regardless of which companies present them. On my blog I have written negatively about a Microsoft FAT patent and a court decision to uphold it; my blog links (in the righthand column) to a couple of websites that criticize Microsoft very aggressively; I linked to TechRights.org several times, a website known for linking about everything in the world to Microsoft but sometimes they do come up with interesting stuff; I mentioned Microsoft' lobbying for EU patent reform in a list of company names that started with IBM and them (and was quoted directly from an FFII presentation)
; I mentioned Microsoft's lobbying (alongside IBM) for software patents in New Zealand, etc.
What I do have to recognize is that things I thought and said five or six years that Microsoft would do concerning patents and open source haven't happened. In the meantime there was the European court decision on the antitrust case and there have been other dynamics in the industry. That doesn't mean that their patents aren't a potential future threat, but there's no clear and present danger while IBM and Apple use patents against open source in ways that are really meant to shut out competition (Microsoft simply doesn't do that with patents, at least not at this stage; they want to do licensing deals but leave people in business). So I don't even defend them because there's simply nothing that they do concerning the assertion of patents against open source that poses a problem (again: that's the way it is now, but I can't substitute my past assumptions for today's reality if I want to be reasonable and facts-based).
Concerning the significant market players interoperability initiative, that's not antitrust where you have a case of companies A, B and C vs. company D. This is about legislation. The law that will come out of the process will apply to every significant player equally. There won't be a Microsoft carve-out in it, nor an Apple or IBM or whatever carve-out. Especially not since Mrs. Kroes is in charge. So let's hope we get a set of really good rules that everyone, including but not limited to Microsoft, will have to comply with.
I have to admit that the thought of Android, Blackberry, etc apps on Apple's App Store would be interesting. ;-)
Emulation could make it happen, in principle at least.
Do the various "services" have to be able to communicate with any kind of "IT product"?
I haven't asked the commissioner but even without doing so I have no doubt that she meant this both ways. Interoperability goes both ways. The only problem is that obviously some companies in the industry want it as a one-way street: others have to open up, they stay closed. I can't imagine a piece of legislation would be one-way. Even if some companies tried to lobby for one-way rules, I don't think they'd get very far.
What's more likely is that the rules may only apply to certain segments of the diverse IT market. But again, within the scope of the rules I can't imagine there would be anything other than quid pro quo, give and take on equal terms.
The EU can't formally legislate on what companies are allowed to do in the US market, but in practical terms, we're talking about a global market for IT products and (especially) Internet-based services. If vendors wanted to apply a different set of openness and interoperability standards in the US than in the EU, they would have to make a lot of efforts to keep the markets separated. They can do it, such as by refusing connections from certain sets of IP addresses, but it would be a major hassle. If many vendors did so, lawmakers in the US would also take a closer look and might consider a similar initiative to benefit customers in their own country.
Concerning Microsoft, the new law isn't even needed for them because they were already subjected to two antitrust proceedings in the EU on the grounds of being found dominant. More importantly, I'm not aware of them treating the US market any differently concerning interoperability with Samba than they treat the EU, even though it was only a European ruling.
The biggest benefit of the envisioned new EU law is that similar rules would also have to be respected by companies who may just not be close enough to a monopolist so that antitrust law can deal with them, but who are powerful enough (such as Apple, Adobe etc.) that it's a problem if they get away with too closed an approach. I don't mean to blame those companies for simply trying to maximize shareholder value or for adhering to certain closed philosophies -- but if antitrust law can't change their behavior, a new instrument is needed.
I wish I could agree that the ruling is at least a draw, but unfortunately I can't. It clearly favors an expansive patent system, assuming that new technologies must fall within the scope of patentable subject matter unless there's legislation that sets limits (mentioned in this analysis, for an example). Such legislation is a long shot to say the least, given the lobbying power of all those favoring software patents.
Through my work on the NoSoftwarePatents campaign (which I founded and managed until 2005) I spent a lot of time with patent experts and policy-makers, so when I read a reasoning like the one in the Bilski case, I can tell when an expansive view prevails over a restrictive one. There's really nothing in the ruling (apart from minority opinions that don't really matter for the future) suggesting in any way that the Supreme Court might do away with software patents. In fact, the ruling made it clear that even straightforward business method patents aren't an endangered species for the time being, unless they're just too abstract, such as the Bilski application.
It was kind of surprising to see on Twitter that not only open source advocates such as Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Brian Proffitt considered that list a good summary but also ACT, a lobby organization that supports software patents all the way (we lobbied against each other several times). But ACT pointed out that they didn't agree with all I wrote. That didn't surprise me.
After all, you were buying into the whole bullshit of "when a user is deleted their comments are assigned to the anonymous user it must be a plot", which indicates someone who is incredibly naive when it comes to managing linked lists (which is what comments are).
You confuse me for someone else because I never talked about that issue of comments assigned to anonymous users...
Please get your facts at least a little straight.
You're in dire need of that, tomhudson.
Again, nothing nefarious. This is an anti-spam provision. Spammer posts some spam, you delete it, but because it's tied to an IP, when they go to check up on their spam, it's "still there" so they don't re-post over and over and over. Then, because their spam apparently is bringing 0 results, they go elsewhere.
The material I have received from multiple sources independently of each other indicates that they don't block "spammers" but simply people they disagree with.
I am increasingly inclined to expose them for what they are, and to shed some light on other issues concerning them than just this one. This behavior is consistent with an overall approach that instead of digging for truth attempts to suppress the truth in a wide variety of ways.
Yep, Groklaw apparently have a habit of blocking commenters whose opinions disagree with the site's viewpoints. This has a few interesting aspects. Firstly, [...] Secondly, [...] Thirdly, [...].
Thank you for this information. I have heard this from several independdent sources, some of which have documented it with screenshots and sent them to me. I would like to ask you to also send me your information and material. I can't promise that I will publish it, and if I do so, I can't promise when, but there is a possibility that I will expose Groklaw for the propaganda tool that it is.
I received some stuff in reply to another call on the community, on this page of my blog. You can find an email address there that I don't check extremely frequently, but I do read everything that gets sent there.
There are ever more indications that Groklaw indeed blocks people simply for disagreement, without justification under a resaonable standard such as promotion of commercial websites, offensive or off-topic content. That's what sets them apart from how unbiased websites operate and raises serious questions even concerning Groklaw's purpose. It certainly doesn't detract from concerns some others have previously had about Groklaw.
Again, you can find a contact email address here.
Here are some quotes from my analysis (I'm the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign):
Again, here's the full text.
tomhudson, you should be careful about accusing others of lying when they simply disagree with you. Concerning your first "FACT": of course IBM has asserted the patents. For a definition of "to assert", here's a link.
tomhudson, are you saying patents are needed to defend copyright?
The whole Oracle/Sun thing was FUD.
I have just asked you on another branch of the discussion tree to clarify what problem you had with my work in that context.
You've claimed that IBM has attacked Hercules. They have not.
I've explained this in multiple comments here and you can also read the views of the maintainer of the Hercules open source project on his blog.
PJ has consistently argued in favour of people being required to respect legal licenses
That's always my position. In addition, there's antitrust law, which can be used against unreasonable conditions in license agreements imposed by dominant players. I assume you supported the EU's case against Microsoft, at least philosophically, didn't you? In that case this is the same legal concept.
Your call for IBM to be required to issue a license on a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis" is an indirect attack on the restrictions of the GPL. Compulsory licensing of GPL code for closed-source software can be supported using the same flawed "logic". We don't want to go down that road again!
If z/OS were available on GPL terms, the four freedoms would take care of the legitimate interests of customers and antitrust intervention wouldn't be needed.
What you write about the license is just wrong because the patents IBM brought into play are patents that either read, if IBM's assertion was correct, also on the Hercules open source emulator (even if you just run z/Linux on it) or they don't do it ever. But here's something else you brought up:
Your actions wrt the Sun/Oracle deal made you into a joke. If you want to blame anyone for your current troll status, look in the mirror. Seriously - thinking you could troll slashdot? Home of the trolls? Not. Going. To. Happen. Especially not when most users think you owe everyone an apology for the crap you pulled wrt Sun/Oracle.
I don't "troll" slashdot. Before there were calls on Groklaw to come over and use mod points, several of my comments here (related to the same article) had a 4-5 and Insightful/Interesting rating. That shows independent, unbiased people considered them useful contributions to the discussion (whether or not they agreed with my views is another question, but they recognized the fact that I made civilized, facts-based, on-topic comments.
Now concerning Oracle/Sun, I quoted your two unspecified references above. What is there that you believe I owe anyone an apology for? If you're more specific, then I can clarify. In my opinion that's unrelated to IBM's wrongdoings anyway, but since you see a connection, could you please explain?
You claim that TurboHercules can be attacked with patents that Hercules (the open source project, and TurboHercules uses nothing else in terms of emulation software) allegedly infringes.
The patents have nothing to do with z/OS. Should they read on Hercules in conjunction with z/OS, then they would also also read on it in conjunction with z/Linux.
You should respect the open source principle of free distribution. Both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition perfectly allow what TurboHercules does. Open source companies are an essential part of the open source ecosystem. What you say would mean that if someone asserted patents that allegedly read on Linux against Red Hat and Novell, this wouldn't mean to assert htem against Linux or open source because those are just simply companies. But it doesn't work that way. The Open Source Initiative even encourages commercialization of the very kind that TurboHercules does.
groklaw is a moderated site; as such, it is expected that comments that don't conform to the site's standards will be removed; most sites, including slashdot, will remove certain types of comments.
I didn't say that they can't remove comments. The question is what standards they apply. If those standards are reasonable and only unreasonable comments get removed, that's one thing. Should any evidence of perfectly resaonable comments being removed ever come up, it would add to concerns over the site's bias and validate some people's impression that it's a propaganda tool. That's why it's interesting to look at.
What's in it for you?
I don't do FUD. I have given a "mission statement" to TechRights who reported on one of Groklaw's recent attacks against me. Here's what I told TechRights: "Of course there are issues, including in the OIN context, where I personally have fears, uncertainty and doubts, and there are reasons for it. That does not make “FUD” my agenda. Instead, my agenda with the FOSS Patents blog is to provide information that (i) helps FOSS developers, distributors and users identify, avoid and deal with patent-related problems and (ii) puts a spotlight on ulterior motives and hypocrisy on the part of false friends of Free and Open Source Software. A long time ago I thought Groklaw shared the first goal. But by writing that IBM is free to sue the pants off TurboHercules, PJ has unfortunately shown that her agenda is different."
Ah, so we're down to playing word games.
I would much prefer to look at all of this from a common sense point of view but if others bring up terminology issues, then so be it and let's talk about them in that case.
simply gloss over the fact that the whole pledge was only about a small subset of the tens of thousands of patents that IBM has.
I criticized the useless quantity of patents covered by the pledge on the very day when it was announced, five and a half years ago. Here's one example of many articles that quoted me that day. Later that same year, I wrote a whole article here on /. in which I explained that those pledges are useless.
Yes, I know one or two of the patents listed on the pledge were on the list of 150 or so sent by Mr Anzani. Somehow I doubt that if they were not there it would make the slightest bit of difference in your statements.
Those are two different aspects. The pledged patents are important from an IBM trustworthiness angle. From another angle, they're just a small part of the overall problem. I discussed this in a blog posting: "the pledged patents are important in one way and unimportant in another"
By the way, any comparison to Google in their approach to patents is meaningless anyway. Google is primarily in the advertising business. IBM is mostly in the intellectual property business.
I've seen a whole more innovation from Google over the last 12 years than from IBM during that same period. Patent experts actually consider Microsoft's innovation much more valuable than IBM's patent-everything-under-the-sun-approach, as I mention in this blog posting on IBM's patent portfolio and patent-related practices.
You actually do think is perfectly OK for someone to simply rip-off an investment representing of billions of dollars by investing nothing yourself, and then claim that is 'competition'.
So would you then also have claimed that Samba, the open source software that interacts with Windows Server, is also just a "rip-off" scheme against the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in its R&D? IBM supported that complaint against Microsoft in the EU. I, too, believe that the EU was right to intervene and I would have liked the EU to go even further and also deal with the software patent problem as a whole. I brought the Microsoft antitrust case up just recently in a presentation I made at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Linux and open source trade show and conference.
Prove it.
The lock-in is not for me to prove but for antitrust regulators and/or judges to evaluate. All of us can express views here but it will be for others to look at both sides of the argument and weigh them. This here is a forum to exchange views and some information but not to "prove" in a legal sense.
The serious people that run these shops know how to do cost/benefit analysis... they still use IBM equipment because it best meets their needs.[...] SysPlex mainframe clusters, for microsecond sync should the business have an outage of a full data center - spending millions per year "extra" to avoid $Ms/minute outages.
[...] we would still need the MF to process, with at least 5 9's reliability, the zillions of transactions per day of other people's money.
I don't deny that IBM may have some high-end hardware. But customers should have choice and they should, depending on the specifics of their business and of a given application, also have the right to opt for emulation/virtualization on Intel-based servers. For a number of use cases that's definitely a viable option. Even if you give a hundred examples here of things that you believe require high-end hardware, there are enough examples to the contrary and if IBM believs that no one would want to use emulation/virtualization of mainframe legacy code on Intel-based servers, IBM could simply give its customers that choice because it wouldn't hurt them. But they know customers want it. I didn't claim that Intel-based emulation/virtualization could replace absolutely every high-end thing that a million-dollar (or multi-million-dollar) system can do. Still, I do defend the idea that customers should have this choice. I also believe they should have the kind of choice that NEON gives them: using lower-cost coprocessors to offload workloads.
That doesn't mean to say that there can be a point where people have to accept responsibility -- but the standard to apply must be a reasonable one, not a theoretical one that doesn't reflect reality.
corrected version: That doesn't mean to say that there CAN'T ...
Failure to maintain and upgrade systems is not lock-in. It is just bad management.
You can always argue someone could have taken smarter decisions or done a better job. You can say the same about anyone using Windows. But from a competition law point of view, what matters is the situation in a market in which real people -- who are imperfect, all of us -- operate. Those real people are not supposed to be milked unfairly. That doesn't mean to say that there can be a point where people have to accept responsibility -- but the standard to apply must be a reasonable one, not a theoretical one that doesn't reflect reality.
Exactly how would Hercules (or any other OSS project) solve these problems?
There are three complaints that were lodged with the EU. The one I naturally care about is the TurboHercules case because it's about free and open source software and emulation/virtualization. The T3 complaint is not known to me. About NEON some things have been written and making the use of coprocessors possible to save operating costs for z/OS software writtein in COBOL looks to me like a very reasonable option that customers should have. Concerning what (Turbo)Hercules can contribute, it clearly is a very interesting choice for many purposes and the idea of making existing ("legacy") mainframe programs run on Intel-based servers makes a lot of economic sense for a lot of purposes.
I can address these claims one by one.
And IBM has not violated their pledge in any way. They have not sued anyone. They have not sent a cease and desist letter to anyone.
IBM's pledge didn't say "we won't sue or send cease-and-desist letters". It was a promise not to assert the relevant patents. For the difference between "assert" and "sue", please check out this blog posting. No one forced IBM to use the broad term "assert", but they did in the original pledge, so I don't think I'm asking for too much if I expect them to comply with it.
They have not even mentioned the existence of the patents to any member of the Hercules OSS project.
Roger Bowler, the founder of TurboHercules and the person to whom IBM addressed its letters, founded the Hercules open source project in 1999.
Jay Maynard, the current maintainer of the Hercules open source project but not employed by TurboHercules (if I recall correctly), interprets this correctly as an attack on the Hercules open source project.
Apart from this, it's not even a relevant point that you try to make. IBM's pledge wasn't limited to companies in any way. It was a promise not to assert those patents "against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software" and you can't sue bits and bytes, so obviously this includes companies. There can be no doubt about it because the pledge later makes reference to the scenario of another "party" (anyone but IBM) asserting its own patents against open source, and that passage clearly includes companies just as well.
The Wall Street Journal was right to ask: if TurboHercules doesn't qualify for the pledge, who does?
They have already taken all the action they need - they refused to license z/OS to run on it.
From a copyright perspective they can refuse, but from an antitrust point of view there can be restrictions on IPR owners and the way they exercise their rights. In my opinion this tying of z/OS to IBM-only hardware should be prohibited as tying based on the case law established in the EU in the original Microsoft antitrust case, based on the fact that IBM is no less dominant in the mainframe market than Microsoft was for desktop PC operating systems at the time of the decision.
Neither IBM, nor Google, nor any other company who has made a similar statement has said they would actively SUPPORT a project that they felt infringed on their IP. All they have said is that they would take a passive approach and not sue.
Google's chief lawyer said they won't "use" patents against open source. That is, like "assert", a far broader terminology than "sue", even though "use" and "sue" are anagrams.
In the 10+ years of it's existence, has IBM ever sent any member of the Hercules project a cease and desist letter? Have they ever actually (not in someone's imagination) threatened a lawsuit? No.
I explained above that (i) they had promised "not to assert" (as opposed to promising "not to sue"), and (ii) the TurboHercules company is a natural part of the Hercules community and ecosystem just like Red Hat and Novell's SuSE decision are for Linux, MySQL AB was for MySQL, etc. Should all those companies not have been included in IBM's pledge?
But you and a few others are trying to paint IBM's refusal to actively support a direct competitor as some sort of 'attack' on open source, and it is just plain dishonest.
Looking at how Google categorically dismisses it as "a bad idea" to use patents against open source, you can see that there are indeed people in the industry who share my view that the use of patents against open source is really bad stuff. I never claimed that they sued, I never claimed that they sent a formal cease-and-desi
You know how many comments PJ deleted on that last story, right?
[...]
Anyhow, actually, I personally commented quite a bit on the TH issue.[...] Not that you'd know that, however, given that she vanished half of the comments. And you can't even tell that she did it, because they'll show up for anyone from your IP, but if you visit Groklaw from elsewhere, they're gone.
Incidentally, I have proof of that in the form of screenshots, logs and quotes.
Other people told me similar stories, but I haven't looked into them in greater detail so far. My focus is really on what the major players in the industry do on the commercial side and in political terms. However, since I already have a collection of material that could be used to expose Groklaw for what it is, I'd like to ask you to send me whatever you have. I got some such material sent in reply to a different call for input, where you find an email address that I use for community input. If you send it to me, I can't promise if or when I'll actually publish it, but it doesn't hurt if I have it in stock because who knows what kinds of debates may come up in the future. Please note that I don't check that email account too frequently, but I do read what I get.