IBM: Broken Promises and Patent Enforcement | Hacker News Reader

IBM: Broken Promises and Patent Enforcement

arstechnica.com

25 pointsCoryOndrejka9 comments

This isn't exactly new behavior for IBM. It's more like tradition there. IBM has an astonishing patent portfolio, routinely topping the list of annual patent counts, and yet does next to nothing with the vast majority of them... until someone else makes money with something that IBM has a patent on. And then the blue-suited lawyers arrive and shake the infringer down for money. Even Sun's been on the receiving end of that.

Anyone familiar with IBM's history would, I think, not be at all surprised by this.

Whatever you think of IBM's ends, the use of these means:

"Mueller points out that two of the patents that IBM listed in its [threatening] letter to Hercules are included in the list of 500 patents that IBM promised to not assert against open source software in 2005."

Can't be seen as good.

I'm guessing when someone notices that they'll drop those two patents from the suit, which still unfortunately leaves 171 patents for which they haven't promised anything.

They probably couldn't actually prevail on those two patents anyway, if it went to trial: a public open letter promising not to sue if someone uses the patents could be interpreted as an implicit patent license, or at least trigger estoppel.

That was my initial understanding too, but I am not sure if TurboHercules, the for-profit company, is shielded as is openHercules, the open-source project. This loophole may allow them to sue and keep their promise at the same time. Again, I am not quite clear if this is the case.

Interesting ... but how could IBM's promise mean anything if TurboHercules, which is an open-source company, isn't protected against assertion of all 500 of those patents.

The loophole is a contractual issue between IBM, its customers, and perhaps TurboHercules (in that the latter is encouraging the customers to violate the contract).

I don't see it having anything to do with open-source patent assertions and again I can't see how IBM's promise would be worth anything if the latter had its own loophole of a "If we sue you for other reason the 500 patents become fair game."

Would it be possible to make a license - "PGPL" - that included something to the effect of "If you assert any patent against any PGPL-licensed project, you lose all rights to all PGPL-licensed projects forever"?