On 4/1/09 2:14 PM, "Erik N Johnson" <e...@uptownmilitia.com> wrote:
> It is rather curious that IBM is being so territorial in this regard. > It would be extraordinarily difficult to break into the system Z clone > market, I would think. Not really. The PSI suit is a good example of how simple it could be, at least at the low end. You could fairly easily manufacture 600+ MIP System z emulated systems these days at a dramatically better price point than the z10BC -- if you could figure out how to avoid the MIRV lawyer launch response from Somers and POK. Wrt to guarding patents and proprietary stuff, they (IBM) are actually pretty lenient as such companies go. If they have patents on valuable technologies, they have to pursue them if they want to keep them. Thus they don't make it easy to reverse engineer their stuff, and they make it legally risky to try. It continually astonishes me that they haven't obliterated the Hercules guys yet -- the Herc guys are in an enormous very-dark-grey area wrt to reverse engineering a number of IBM patents on System z technology. I think that kind of action would be enormously counterproductive for IBM in that it would waste a lot of good will in the community they've built up due to liberal patent use policies, but that's not my decision. Let's take this one offline. It really isn't Linux related any more. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
