IBM has sued a server company over patent infringement, on the heels of its patent lawsuit against Amazon. Says Bruce:
It shows that IBM isn’t really going to help when it comes to protecting Open Source from software patents. They’re on the wrong side of the problem. But remember, they brought the case that made software patents legal in the U.S.
So, um, how come we haven’t heard a peep from the Stallman-Moglen-FSF anti-patent brigade about these lawsuits? IBM seems to have bought itself a free pass. Try to imagine the outrage if Microsoft or Oracle had filed these lawsuits. Legal expert Daniel Ravicher would be telling us why the cited patents are not legitimate. Groklaw would be tearing apart the legal filings and declaring that the claims were absolutely bogus and didn’t stand a chance in court.
Selective enforcement? You bet. But you have to hand it to IBM. Like a crafty politician, they’ve spread around a lot of “walking around” money and now have the noisy professional protesters doing their bidding, attacking their competitors and leaving them alone, even while they proceed to engage in business as usual, shaking down rivals for patent payments.
RSS
