IBM: Open Source’s Friend or Foe?
Florian Mueller – the EU campaigner involved in the software patents war – a couple of months ago talking about the Sun-MySQL merger called IBM a “false friend of open source”, but when I asked for more details he told me to wait.
Today he pointed me to his new foss patents blog entry reporting IBM has concerns about unauthorized use of proprietary IBM information by TurboHercules contributors.
Roger Bowler – CEO of TurboHercules, the company behind the mainframe emulator distributed under the Q Public license – asked IBM to consider adding such intellectual property to the IBM “non-assertion†pledge to the open source community.
Is there any chance that IBM would consider that?
Read more at The Register and at Dana Blankenhorn’s blog.
Actually I didn’t take any position yet, though I believe that posing questions is legitimate and it doesn’t imply a judgment, as eloquently explained Simon Phipps.