"Other Mainframe Company" Files Complaint Against "Other Monopoly"

January 20, 2009 at 5:28 am PT

This morning T3 filed an antitrust complaint against IBM in Europe, accusing the company of abusing its monopoly power in Europe’s computer mainframe market. In the complaint, “the other mainframe company”–as T3 likes to refer to itself–claims IBM has hamstrung sales of competing mainframe hardware products by tying the sale of its own OS to its mainframe hardware. “For decades, IBM licensed its system software and intellectual property to other computer manufacturers,” T3 President Steven Friedman said in a statement. “However, for no reason other than to remove all competition from the mainframe market, IBM eliminated programs to allow customers to buy its mainframe software for use on non-IBM mainframe solutions. It also used legal threats and anti-competitive actions to shut down competitors such as T3.”

Damning accusations, and ones that would seem to suggest that though it was conceived in the vacuum tube era, the consent decree that prevented IBM from tying hardware and software sales may not have been quite as obsolete IBM claimed.

News of T3′s European complaint comes just days after the European Commission charged Microsoft (MSFT) with illegally tying its Internet Explorer Web browser to Windows.

Tagged with: IBM, John Paczkowski, mainframe, Microsoft, T3

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http://blog.macb.net Mac Beach

What I’d really like to see happen is for the Justice Department to stop “selectively” enforcing this “law”.

Let me have versions of OS X that run on any Intel computer that it can be reasonably ported to. Let me run Windows, if I’m foolish enough to want such a thing, directly on an Apple computer. When you get right down to it there are no secrets in the secret sauce that makes these OSs work. The tieing that takes place is pure marketing gimmickry, not intellectual property in action. Making them essentially Open Source for the purpose of porting and device integration in fact does not take any ownership right away from the companies that invented such software (to the extent that there is any invention involved) but it does allow the software to do what OSs are supposed to do, and that is isolate users and applications from the constraints of hardware.