RE: Re: slanted article "Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson"

Paul and Paul,

 

You both make valid points, and I think there is no easy answer to the
inherent tradeoff between intellectual property rights and antitrust
enforcement. Patent law provides limited monopoly power to encourage and
protect investment in innovative technology, and antitrust law seeks to
prevent the abuse of that monopoly power to the detriment of society.
Usually, especially in US law, that detriment is evaluated in terms of
direct economic harm to consumers in the form of above-market pricing. I
believe that a strong case can be made that IBM's treatment of emulation
technology did cause and will continue to cause economic harm in that
traditional sense. However, intellectual property can also be abused, and in
my opinion was abused by IBM in this case, to the detriment of technological
innovation itself. That is also very harmful to society, albeit more
indirectly and more difficult to quantify in immediate economic terms.

 

Ron Hilton

 

  _____  

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of kerravon86
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 9:07 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [hercules-advocacy] Re: slanted article "Inside System Storage --
by Tony Pearson"

 

  

--- In [email protected]
<mailto:hercules-advocacy%40yahoogroups.com> , Paul Raulerson
<paul.raulerson@...> wrote:
>
> We are definitely going to be disagreeing on this one Paul. 
> 
> While I do agree that companies need to be far 
> more accountable,

That wasn't even a point I was making. I thought
I said something close to the opposite of that.

> that argument has nothing much to do with Hercules vs. IBM. 
> 
> Believe it or not, IBM *does* have a point about 
> protecting IP that they spent *billions* of dollars 
> to develop. 

No-one is disputing that.

> MVS alone cost about a *billion* dollars to develop.

So ... sell it (z/OS)! That's all TurboHercules asked
them to do.

Not try to get hardware sales at the same time.

Incidentally, the cost of developing the "free"
MVS 3.8j was basically paid for by the people
who purchased IBM hardware decades ago. In case
that is relevant.

BFN. Paul.



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