AT risk of sounding like a broken record, let's make a point absolutely clear and be upfront about it. Our Openwashing Reports have often mentioned IBM as an habitual faker and culprit; IBM is, at its core, still a proprietary software company, unlike Red Hat. But IBM is bad for two more reasons: 1) it lobbies for software patents and 2) it shakes down companies with such patents. When it comes to patent policy and practice, IBM is hardly better than Microsoft; it just targets GNU/Linux a lot less (if at all); it gave us OIN.

"Techrights would rather not spend much time or dedicate much space to IBM criticism because it's hardly the foremost threat to Software Freedom; it's mostly a threat to a sane patent policy/law."It seems safe to believe or to think many Red Hat employees already know what IBM is and does (IBM's patent shakedown is decades-old). The rest are in denial about it or choose to say nothing, even among themselves. Henrion brought up a recent court document [PDF] and stated that "IBM is a software patent bully," quoting from the corresponding document: "Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service, Method for simultaneous display of multiple object categories, Method for a runtime user account creation operation within a SSO process in a federated computing..."

We discussed this over IRC on Thursday. The IRC logs will unfortunately not be ready for publication until the end of this year (we used to publish these daily, then weekly, now it's 3 times a year in large lumps).

Another person wrote: "IBM published today a patent application on "software controlled ad-avatars (or bots)" for advertising in virtual worlds. Relatable bot profiles include "Jenny Teen," "Joe Geek," and "Travis Cowboy." US 20190287119."

There's also a picture there.

Techrights would rather not spend much time or dedicate much space to IBM criticism because it's hardly the foremost threat to Software Freedom; it's mostly a threat to a sane patent policy/law. We hope that Red Hat can influence IBM positively (rather than the other way around). ⬆