jangr@microsoft.UUCP (Jan Gray) (07/06/88)
[Excerpted without permission from InfoWorld, July 4, 1988:] IBM DEMANDS LICENSE FEES FOR RISC By Martin Marshall Asserting its claim to basic RISC technology, IBM last week began warning vendors of RISC-based systems that they need a license from IBM or they risk a lawsuit charging patent infringement. RISC workstation vendors Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View, California, and Apollo Computer Systems Inc. of Billerica, Massaschusetts, both said last week that they have received letters from IBM's legal department regarding the licensing of IBM RISC technology. IBM wants the same licensing terms from RISC systems vendors that it sought earlier this year from AT-bus and Micro Channel clone vendors, said IBM spokesman Michael Starks. Under those terms, up to 1 percent of sales revenues for a product using one IBM patent would go to IBM, while up to 5 percent of sales would be handed over for use of multiple IBM patents. "IBM developed RISC technology in the mid-1970s," according to Starks, "and it currently holds more than a dozen patents related to RISC techology." The IBM RISC patents cover hardware techology such as parallel instruction execution, which is a key to multiprocessor architectures; compiler optmization technology relating to branch sequencing and subexpression elimination; and operating system technology relating to task scheduling, virtual memory management, and dynamic configuration, according to Starks. [The rest of the article describes that o Sun believes they are not exposed because SPARC "...is based on unique work done at Sun". o Hewlett-Packard and Motorola have prior licensing agreements with IBM which may include the RISC patents. o MIPS, Fujitsu, Cypress, LSI Logic, and AT&T haven't been contacted by IBM.] Does anyone happen to know the IBM RISC patent numbers? Jan Gray uunet!microsoft!jangr Microsoft Corp., Redmond Wash. 206-882-8080
erict@flatline.UUCP (j eric townsend) (07/07/88)
In article <1591@microsoft.UUCP>, jangr@microsoft.UUCP (Jan Gray) writes: > [Excerpted without permission from InfoWorld, July 4, 1988:] > IBM DEMANDS LICENSE FEES FOR RISC > By Martin Marshall > The IBM RISC patents cover hardware techology such as parallel instruction > execution, which is a key to multiprocessor architectures; I bet they own the patent for binary representation of data if you ask them. They probably own the patent on forcing users to have a parallel printer port and a serial everything-else port, but they can keep *that* patent. :-) -- Skate UNIX or go home, boogie boy... J. Eric Townsend ->uunet!nuchat!flatline!erict smail:511Parker#2,Hstn,Tx,77007 ..!bellcore!tness1!/
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (07/11/88)
>o Sun believes they are not exposed because SPARC "...is based on unique work > done at Sun". This is entertaining, since the SPARC architecture is very nearly a straight crib from the original Berkeley RISC project. -- Anyone who buys Wisconsin cheese is| Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology a traitor to mankind. --Pournelle |uunet!mnetor!utzoo! henry @zoo.toronto.edu