[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“Following yesterday’s piece on Microsoft playing the patent
card against Linux we were pointed to an interview with IBM’s
Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer at Linux Forum Denmark. It’s been around
for a while, but Strassemeyer has some interesting things to say
about IBM, Linux and patents, so it’s still worth looking at.“Strassemeyer, from IBM… Germany, is best known for getting
Linux running on the IBM S/390, and this is what he used as his
first example. He had arranged to see Linus Torvalds in order to
show him the S/390 patch, and explain how it worked, ‘so that he
could read into it a little bit and give us advice, on how to do it
differently or whatever, right?’“When IBM’s lawyers heard about it they said to him this was
going to be ‘a distribution,’ and that he couldn’t do it. This,
says Strassemeyer, is how he learned what a distribution was. If
however he showed Torvalds the code running on IBM premises, and
Torvalds didn’t take anything away afterwards, then this wasn’t a
distribution, and was therefore cool with the lawyers…”