{"id":3275,"date":"2010-06-02T12:48:42","date_gmt":"2010-06-02T12:48:42","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-04-18T22:54:04","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T22:54:04","slug":"ibm-open-source-friend-of-foe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/?p=3275","title":{"rendered":"IBM &#8211; Open Source friend of foe?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>IBM has for a long time been a contributor to the Open Source community involving themselves in various projects, just take a look at http:\/\/www.ibm.com\/developerworks\/opensource\/ Eclipse, WAS CE and many more. All this in areas where there are many competitors, Microsoft being the main competitor I would guess. Point is, all this in areas where IBM are not alone.<\/p>\n<p>But, IBM has monopoly of one area, and that is the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/IBM_mainframe\">mainframe<\/a>. They have full control of the whole value chain, both the hardware and the OS and then many tools as well. So here comes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hercules-390.org\/\">Hercules mainframe emulator<\/a> trying to let people run mainframe applications on other hardware&#8230;and the response from IBM&#8230;lawsuit of course. I would assume mainframe being the most valuable asset IBM has control over. But I won&#8217;t try to dive into all the nifty details here, but instead just provide you with my sources, see<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Blog Foss Patents &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/fosspatents.blogspot.com\/2010\/04\/ibm-breaks-taboo-and-betrays-its.html\">IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community<\/a>&#8220;<\/li>\n<li>Blog Armed and Dangerous &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1889\">IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?<\/a>&#8220;<\/li>\n<li>Ars Technica, Open Ended &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/open-source\/news\/2010\/04\/ibm-breaks-oss-patent-promise-targets-mainframe-emulator.ars\">IBM breaks OSS patent promise, targets mainframe emulator<\/a>&#8220;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The last one in the list above diving a bit into the details on why IBM is making the lawsuit (apart from protecting their money). I would assume that most people understand why they do it, but that they have chosen the wrong weapon to fight against competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>IBM has for a long time been a contributor to the Open Source community involving themselves in various projects, just take a look at http:\/\/www.ibm.com\/developerworks\/opensource\/ Eclipse, WAS CE and many more. All this in areas where there are many competitors, Microsoft being the main competitor I would guess. Point is, all this in areas where [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14330,"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3275\/revisions\/14330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hellem.org\/wblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}