IBM versus LzLabs

The IBM UK court case against Swiss-based LzLabs and UK-based Winsopia highlights a number of important issues. Firstly, it seems natural justice that if your company has spent money developing some technology that you should have every right to copyright it and prevent other people from using your original work without paying for it. Secondly, you should be able to choose who you licence your technology to, and they should be expected to pay for that licence. That is basically IBM UK’s case. It is saying that LzLabs has taken their tech and is using it as if it were their own. They want LzLabs to cease and desist.

LzLabs has a different view. It is saying that it has found a way to emulate a mainframe and do it in software. It is a completely different thing, and IBM, being a large organization, is using its size and weight (metaphorically) to prevent LzLabs from lawfully conducting its business.

At its heart, that’s what this court case is all about.

What exactly has LzLabs done? Their product allows customers to migrate off IBM mainframes and onto other hardware platforms without making changes to the software they are running. Obviously, if enough customers do that, it’s going to affect IBM’s revenue stream going into the future. But that’s not what this court case is about. What IBM is asserting is that it is “inconceivable” that LzLabs, and its UK subsidiary Winsopia, could have developed their migration software without illegally reverse engineering IBM’s technology.

By focusing on that aspect, IBM can make it seem they are not being bully boys and trying to prevent a potential competitor. They are, quite rightly, protecting their copyrighted material, which they have created, at great expense, over a number of years. And, put that way, it seems right and proper that IBM should sue.

Of course, LzLabs is saying that its tools were developed lawfully in keeping with the EU Software Directive and UK law, which encourages innovation by competitors. So, they have done nothing wrong.

We all know about IBM, its mainframes, its cloud, its work on AI, and its business in general. LzLabs, you may recall, launched the Software Defined Mainframe (SDM) in 2016, which, as mentioned earlier, provides a way for mainframe applications to run on other platforms, eg Linux.

IBM wants LzLabs to stop selling its product, which IBM claims is using IBM’s own software.

You might be wondering where the UK company Winsopia comes into all this. Well, IBM claims that Winsopia leased an IBM mainframe (that bit is not disputed), but it then breached its licence, and it was that breach which allowed LzLabs to develop SDM. What was the breach? Basically, it reverse-engineered and reverse compiled the mainframe software. That allowed LzLabs to understand the design and structure of the mainframe software, and allowed them to recreate it. That was prohibited by the contract between IBM and Winsopia. In fact, IBM is suggesting that Winsopia is a shell company whose sole purpose is to act as a front for LzLabs and gain access to IBM equipment and software.

LzLabs and Winsopia, not surprisingly, insist that the contract wasn’t breached and that they were able to build SDM because they had spent years observing, studying, and testing how customer applications interact with mainframes. LzLabs claims that it has a team of experienced engineers, and they used information published by IBM about its technology. Plus, there’s widespread industry knowledge about mainframes. In addition, LzLabs states that it could never directly access Winsopia’s mainframe.

The defence team also affirmed that SDM was functionally completed in 2013, which predates the creation of Winsopia.

Let’s turn our attention to a product from ColeSoft – its source-level assembler debugger, z/XDC, which first became available in 1980. IBM’s expert witness, Michael Swanson, has been in court proposing that LzLabs’ use of z/XDC was “invasive”, suggesting that LzLabs had used the debugger to disassemble IBM’s modules.

The LzLabs defence team, however, suggested that Swanson appeared “to have no real-world mainframe knowledge” since 1999. The lawyers showed that z/XDC is widely used by “big players” in the mainframe arena “for the purpose of developing commercial software”. Swanson agreed that using z/XDC for testing and debugging was not an “unusual or uncommon” use of the tool.

The court case continues.

LzLabs is owned by John Moore, and this is not the first time one of his companies has faced IBM in the courtroom. Moore founded NEON Enterprise Software (in 1995), which developed a product called zPrime.

As you know, IBM charges users by the amount of General Purpose Processor (GPP) they use, while also making specialty processors available for things like Linux and Db2. Now, doing your processing in a specialty processor saves money because you’re not using the chargeable GPPs – and, in real life, it can save money by putting off the need for an expensive upgrade. zPrime allowed users to run an estimated 50% of their workloads on specialty processors – that’s not just Db2, that was IMS, CICS, TSO/ISPF, batch, whatever. IBM sued NEON in 2009, and it was settled in May 2011. NEON Enterprise Software lost and disappeared.

It will be interesting to see how the LzLabs case goes over the next few weeks.