The technology giant is taking Zurich-based startup LzLabs to court, alleging that it made “unlawful use” of parts of its software.
  • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    8 months ago

    Never heard of LzLabs before today, but I hope they succeed. Fuck IBM and their proprietary bullshit

  • dugmeup@lemmy.worldEnglish
    50·
    8 months ago

    What a joke of a lawsuit. IBM wants to lock in its clients for an eternity.

    Look at this from the article:

    LzLabs’ product helps its clients migrate from IBM computer mainframe technology onto open source alternatives. The US company says that it is “inconceivable” that LzLabs — and its UK subsidiary Winsopia — could have developed that migration software without illegally reverse engineering IBM’s technology.

    • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      63·
      8 months ago

      Clean room reverse engineering is entirely legal. Fuck IBM, they’re pulling an Oracle.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        8 months ago

        Maybe I’m the US, but is it legal in the UK? Also too, if the matter is the fact that they didn’t physically reverse engineer the subsidiarity’s mainframe, and in fact were able to piece together software solutions to drop in, how in the world is that a violation of anything?

    • palordrolap@kbin.social
      8·
      8 months ago

      These IBM folks need to have a chat with whatever department recently agreed to open-source MS-DOS 4.00 (IBM had joint control with Microsoft), because they know full-well that third-party copyright-free largely MS-DOS compatible products exist and have existed for quite some time now.

      This is the same deal but with their bigger iron.

      Now it’s true that there were a few DOS clones that somehow fell afoul of copyright that were killed off pretty quick, but the only other way to get DOS-compatibility is by… reverse engineering.

      And if they sued about that, they must have lost because alternative DOS clones continue to exist.

      The only caveat I can see here is that the successful clones are open-source and free of cost.

      If this company are charging anything at all, that could be the angle of attack. It might be the only angle of attack.

      But I’m not a lawyer and have probably missed something blindingly obvious. Or devious.

  • breadsmasher@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    8 months ago

    “We built our services to lock in users in such a way, that only reverse engineering it is how to break out!”

  • RedFox@infosec.pubEnglish
    131·
    8 months ago

    It’s pretty plain to see IBM afraid of loosing vendor lock-in, but running a software solution designed for an open or distributed platform shouldn’t be that big of a threat, right?

    All their selling points for z series are the insane hardware performance, redundancy, and tuning.

    Isn’t it unlikely you’re going to get that on some virtual or abstracted mainframe platform?

    If I was one of the businesses that’s been paying the fortune keeping IBM mainframe alive, I’d stay on it. They measure profits in the billions and saving some money going away from IBM and risking loosing countless dollars per minute seems like a risk…

    Oh wait, I forgot, all American Corps are currently (since the 80s-ish), worthless greedy fucks solely focused on short term profit and stock price regardless of long term consequences. Maybe they should save some money on one of the things that’s helps make them billions…I bet that golden goose tastes amazing 😄