rebill's Journal: IBM's Doomsday Weapon

The amazing thing about the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit is watching the IBM lawyers work in their element. I had the pleasure of working for IBM off and on during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and one thing that the company was very good about was ... patents.

Inside the company there were regular reminders about making sure that any patentable ideas should actually get patented - and rewards for people who generated viable ones for the company. The rewards were good enough that people responded, and IBMs portfolio of patents is huge as a result.

Patents on Mice? IBM had them in the mainframe days. Patents on Hyperlinks? British Telecom does not have a chance when IBM pulls out its prior art. Patents on XML? I think I still have my SGML references around, somewhere - you'd think that Mr. Berners-Lee concept of HTML might have come from somewhere, eh? (For the subtlety-challenged: he used an old IBM reference manual as his base to work from.)

All along, IBM has played nice with everyone and let them squeak by without licensing fees on a lot of things in the software industry, presumably because, eventually, someone would patent something that IBM would run afoul of, and that . . . to keep from losing big bucks in a lawsuit, the patent portfolio could be brought out of the vault. A mere threat of a huge and easily provable counter-suit could quash the other guy, and get him to agree to a simple, "we'll let you use ours if you let us use yours" point of view. "Detente" or "Ultimate Destruction" - very 1970s/1980s, and very, very effective.

When you talk about "Enterprise Class" software, who do you think built the big mainframes? Technology to coordinating how Multiprocessors worked together? Sure, they were using EBCDIC instead of ASCII, but a technique described in Spanish is just as valid as one described in English.

So, it took a long time, but someone decided to finally challenge IBM. IBM - an organization that has been paying top-notch legal talent to plan and prepare for this kind of situation for DECADES. I think that this shows in IBMs briefs in the case. SCO may have paid for highly talented lawyers, but how long did they have to plan for this lawsuit?

The dragon has been awakened by the barking of a little yap-dog. The real drama is in waiting to see how IBM deals with the situation - will the dragon merely move a paw and silence the annoyance? Will the dragon bite down on the poor thing and spit it back out? Or, will it breathe fire into the air in a display of power as a warning shot, and convince SCO that maybe this wasn't such a good idea? Or will we have charcoal brickettes where SCO used to be?

One can only wonder.

Frankly, given how easily debunked each specific SCO claim has been, I doubt that IBM will have to use their patent portfolio against SCO. It's almost a shame. They have this big toy, and they will not have to use it.