So what do the proponents of Oracle's acquisition of Sun think now?

Posted Aug 14, 2010 12:23 UTC (Sat) by FlorianMueller (subscriber, #32048) [Link]

Except that TurboHercules is NOT a FOSS *project*. It's a commercial company set up to take advantage of IBM.

With this argument, Oracle Corp. is free to attack Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. would be free to attack Red Hat Inc., and JBoss Inc. or MySQL AB should never even have existed (before they were acquired) because at the time Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. should have just killed them with their patents.

I leave it to the readers here to decide whether there's any point in saying that a FOSS company, especially if it provides support for a FOSS program in a very professional context, isn't part of the FOSS ecosystem.

TurboHercules's founder, Roger Bowler, founded the Hercules FOSS project in 1999. TurboHercules's software is 100% the Hercules open source emulator. Both Hercules and TurboHercules's offerings are available for Linux as well as Windows; customers get to choose, just like with MySQL or Apache or PHP.

Why shouldn't they defend themselves.

What you call "defend", others call anticompetitive, destructive patent warfare. I leave it to the audience here to decide with whom to agree more. I'm comfortable that way.

After all, IBM's *ONLY* "crime" against TurboHercules has been to say "we don't want to do business with you".

That's absolutely wrong.

As I documented in this blog posting, based on the publication of all four letters exchanged between IBM and TurboHercules, there were two separate issues. One is the z/OS licensing question. IBM said No. That had nothing to do with the other issue, the patent threats. Those came out of the blue/Blue. Should Hercules infringe any of those patents (which would have to be proven), then it infringes them regardless of whether the operating system you run in emulation is z/OS or z/Linux. Those were just emulation patents, not operating system patents.

Even though the patent threat is therefore independent from the proprietary z/OS operating system, I would like to point out that the European Commission would not have launched its formal investigation (actually two parallel investigations) if TurboHercules had not had a point under antitrust law to ask for a way so that its customers could run z/OS in emulation.

So the way the process is going so far before an independent regulatory agency, I'm on the winning side and PJ on the losing side.