It was a while ago that I was reading through an article or a blog that had been published online, and I thought it seemed familiar. Some of the phrases used in it seemed like something I might write. And, in fact, it was a rewrite of a blog that I’d published a little while before. Although parts of it were new, large chunks were pretty much word-for-word what I’d put in my original article. Two questions sprung to mind. Had I lost any money because they’d re-used large parts of my text? How did it make me feel?
In my case, I usually don’t get paid for blogs that are attributed to me. Articles are usually paid for and that often means that someone else has copyright on the text. So, I hadn’t lost any money. When it came to my feelings, I wondered whether I ought to be very cross that someone was passing off my work as their own. Or should I simply be cross because they’d been too lazy to write their own words? Or did I feel quite pleased that they thought my work was so good it was worth copying? The truth was that I felt a strange mix of all three – and did nothing about it. And it has happened more than once since then.
So, no legal fees, no team of lawyers working on my case. Through mental confusion, indolence, and a feeling of powerlessness because the Internet is rife with plagiarism, I did nothing. But don’t take that as permission to steal all my published work!
In 2007, my company started doing some work for Neon Enterprise Software, a software company with some IMS products. In fact, because of that relationship, in December of that year, the very first Virtual IMS user group meeting was held. Neon’s Kristine Harper gave a presentation entitled, “Why Assembler is a 21st century language”.
Neon went on to develop a product which they called zPrime. It allowed users to run applications on IBM specialty processors, zIIP (z Integrated Information Processor) and zAAP (z Application Assist Processor), rather than on the more expensive central processors. There was even a version for IMS. IBM wasn’t best pleased at this because, I assume, they would lose revenue. They told customers not to use it. As a consequence, Neon sued IBM, saying that IBM was unduly restricting users by forcing them to run workloads on more expensive processors. IBM fairly promptly, countersued. They said that Neon was infringing IBM’s patents. Eventually, the argument was settled out of court in 2011, but zPrime was no longer available and eventually Neon ceased trading. However, a US District Court barred Neon and some members of staff from reverse engineering, reverse compiling, and translating certain IBM software. In addition, they were banned from distributing certain Neon software products.
Mark Cresswell is currently the executive chairman of a company called LzLabs. He had been CEO at Neon. Apparently, LzLabs started up in stealth mode in 2011 and launched its first product in 2016.
IBM is now suing LzLabs because LzLab’s software-defined mainframe (SDM) product violates its mainframe patents. What does LzLabs’ product do? It runs mainframe software in the cloud. And it does this more cheaply than running it on a mainframe. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to spot the parallels between these two companies and court cases. IBM claims that Lzlabs uses software that has been reverse engineered from IBM’s products. IBM also says that LzLabs is making false claims about its products.
LzLabs says that SDM uses containerized workloads running on Linux on x86 processors in a cloud environment. And users don’t need to recompile their code. IBM’s argument is that in order to translate mainframe instructions into x86 instructions, LzLabs would have to infringe two IBM patents for doing that. IBM also argues that for LzLabs to claim optimized performance, they must be using methods that IBM holds patents for in order for there to be any kind of increased emulation/translation efficiency.
Patents are a great way to show that you or your company originated a specific way of working. No-one wants other people to steal their ideas and make money out of it. And that means it is perfectly alright for large companies to sue smaller companies that do – or at least seem to – steal their ideas. If you follow Darwin’s ideas of ‘survival of the fittest’, then it simply seems like the natural order of things that larger animals will eat smaller animals.
An alternative view was proposed by Pyotr Kropotkin in his 1902 book, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution”. His view was that where animals practice mutual aid, they, “are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress”. He goes on to suggest that, “unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay”. Kropotkin found that many societies exhibited cooperation among individuals and groups as the norm.
Now I know that Western society has traditionally followed the ‘dog-eat-dog’ approach proposed by Darwin. What I’m suggesting is that mutual aid might be a strategy that’s worth investigating further and possibly adopting. So, rather than IBM destroying its enemies (ie companies that infringe its intellectual property, whether copyrighted or patented or not), perhaps it could work with them to their mutual benefit and the benefit of mainframe-using companies.
Even IBM must recognize that the cloud usage pricing structure is a huge threat to its rolling 4-hour average (R4HA) way of working.
I guess it depends on whether you think thieves should be punished or rehabilitated back into society as useful citizens. There must be a mathematical formula for working out which approach brings the greatest gain, isn’t there?
I’m not saying it’s OK to ‘borrow’ someone else’s work – far from it – I’m just suggesting that sometimes ‘carrots’ work better than ‘sticks’ for the good of the mainframe community.
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