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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

So any use of software patents is unduly "exclusionary [and] anticompetitive", especially when applied to commercial users of open-source software?

I hadn't really picked up a strong "they're all wrong" vibe from what I've seen of your coverage of the smartphone mess.

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You're now trying, not for the first time in this discussion, quite desperately to pretend not to understand what I say.

You previously just phrased my 3rd option differently to artifically create a 4th option.

Now you don't take into account that I explained 3 different approaches: grant a free license, grant a FRAND license, and prohibit any implementation of the patented invention only to foreclose competition, which is exactly what IBM (a monopolist in the context we're discussing) tried. Fortunately, the European Commission is investigating IBM for suspected violations of EU competition law.

You're implying that any use of patents to stifle competition is probably illegal, and should certainly be investigated. That rather thoroughly contradicts the definition of "patent".

Further, IBM's decade of tolerating Hercules development suggests that they do see a difference between community infringement and commercial infringement.

Your first paragraph is, once again, a complete strawman as opposed to what I said or implied. Not granting a license to a patent on FRAND terms is certainly anticompetitive, but not necessarily illegal. If, however, a monopolist does so in order to foreclose competition, then it raises serious antitrust issues and can, as the result of a regulatory process or lawsuit, be deemed illegal.

Your second paragraph doesn't make sense to me given that the patents asserted by IBM in that correspondence were related to the Hercules open source emulator, not specific to any commercial offering. The maintainer of the Hercules project explained on his blog why this was an attack on the Hercules project as a whole: http://ibmvshercules.com/

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