Re: News - Commercial Version of Hercules - Turbo Hercules

Ok, got it.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29469085/IBM-letter-dated-11-March-2010-to-TurboHercules-SAS

Most/all of these things are methods for making hardware
go faster or better.

This is designed to give their computers an edge
over someone else's computer.

In my opinion, these would only be applicable if
someone was actually making a real CPU, and tried
to make it go as fast as IBM's, and could never
manage to do that, because the method IBM uses
is superior.

Hercules isn't even in this competition. It's
running on completely alien hardware that, if it
uses those patents at all, the price would already
have been paid by Intel, and the charge passed on
to me when I bought my x86.

IBM thinks they can charge twice for the same
thing, because in one of them it is implemented
in mere software?

IBM are trying to take hardware patents and
trying to apply them to software? Is that 
unprecedented?

Other things like z/390 would also fall into this
category if that was the case. As would any
assembler that takes a "compare and swap" and
converts it into x86 code (there is/was an
asm370 dos executable that did that sort of thing,
can't remember the details).

If my PC really did have such an instruction,
Hercules would run so much faster, as it could
directly execute the instruction instead of
having to translate it into what my machine
really uses (just like any compiler does). It
is in fact exactly an interpreter, rather than
a compiler, in that respect. That's why it is
orders of magnitude slower!!!

Also, IBM is clearly just fishing. They simply
listed every patent they had at hand.  There has
been no attempt to prove that Hercules violated
any particular one. Certainly no court ruling to
say that either.

I don't believe IBM can refuse to license software
on the basis that the other party is violating
patents when there is no such judgement in
existence. Although in that case, you still need to
get a judgement against IBM in the first place to
say that their behaviour as described above is
indeed illegal.

Also, they mentioned PSI. They did not win a
judgement against PSI, right?. Which means they
effectively conceded defeat when they bought the 
company out. I'm sure they would have much
preferred to get a quick and obvious judgement
and bankrupted the company instead. But they
couldn't make anything stick.

Also, on top of all that - if there's only one
obvious way to do something, the patent itself
won't stick (when tested in court). Exactly how
does one implement a "compare and swap instruction"
found in a z/OS executable without violating any
patents? I haven't seen how IBM or Hercules do it.
In fact, I don't even know the name of the
instruction, which is why I keep on spelling it
out (I'm too lazy to even look it up). So does
that mean I can write a clean-room version of
the compare and swap instruction? When we both
know that the Hercules code was clean-room anyway.
Nobody had access to or could be bothered to
dissect IBM firmware.

And while we're at it, software patents are generally
rare and nasty. Hercules is software. IBM hasn't
listed any of those rare and nasty software patents
at all that I can see.

BFN.  Paul.




--- In [email protected], Harold Grovesteen <h.grovsteen@...> wrote:
>
> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/ibm-breaks-oss-patent-promise-targets-mainframe-emulator.ars
> 
> In this article there is a link to Florian Mueller's blog entry that has 
> posted the non-exhaustibe list of patents.
> 
> Harold Grovesteen
> 
> kerravon86 wrote:
> 
> >  
> >
> > --- In [email protected] 
> > <mailto:hercules-advocacy%40yahoogroups.com>, Mike Schwab 
> > <Mike.A.Schwab@> wrote:
> > >
> > > How about, when they license z/OS to a customer, they add a 5%
> > > surcharge for the IBM patents used by the emulator to be paid to the
> > > patent holders?
> >
> > Sorry, what is the nature of the patents allegedly
> > being violated? How do Fujitsu etc manage to make
> > compatible machines if there are paents involved?
> > Do they have to pay patent fees to IBM for that?
> > If so, it's just a matter of isolating such
> > patents and adding them to the cost of TurboHercules
> > when making sales? It can even be itemized in the
> > bills.
> >
> > And when is the last of these patents due to expire?
> >
> > And I assume that anything related to the S/370
> > architecture has long ago expired.
> >
> > And can Hercules be reworked to avoid the alleged
> > patent infringement while still running z/OS?
> >
> > BFN. Paul.
> >
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>