this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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What a joke of a lawsuit. IBM wants to lock in its clients for an eternity.
Look at this from the article:
LzLabs’ product helps its clients migrate from IBM computer mainframe technology onto open source alternatives. The US company says that it is “inconceivable” that LzLabs — and its UK subsidiary Winsopia — could have developed that migration software without illegally reverse engineering IBM’s technology.
Clean room reverse engineering is entirely legal. Fuck IBM, they're pulling an Oracle.
Shit they're pulling an old school IBM eh?
Maybe I'm the US, but is it legal in the UK? Also too, if the matter is the fact that they didn't physically reverse engineer the subsidiarity's mainframe, and in fact were able to piece together software solutions to drop in, how in the world is that a violation of anything?
These IBM folks need to have a chat with whatever department recently agreed to open-source MS-DOS 4.00 (IBM had joint control with Microsoft), because they know full-well that third-party copyright-free largely MS-DOS compatible products exist and have existed for quite some time now.
This is the same deal but with their bigger iron.
Now it's true that there were a few DOS clones that somehow fell afoul of copyright that were killed off pretty quick, but the only other way to get DOS-compatibility is by... reverse engineering.
And if they sued about that, they must have lost because alternative DOS clones continue to exist.
The only caveat I can see here is that the successful clones are open-source and free of cost.
If this company are charging anything at all, that could be the angle of attack. It might be the only angle of attack.
But I'm not a lawyer and have probably missed something blindingly obvious. Or devious.