IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software IBM has filed a lawsuit against Micro Focus, alleging the enterprise software company copied and reverse-engineered its CICS mainframe service to develop a rival product, the Micro Focus Enterprise Server. Big Blue has brought the case in the US District Court in New York, citing violation of copyright law and claiming that …
You forget that many hundreds of smaller companies have ancient software that they rely on to do business, wishing to upgrade does not pay for upgrades, so what works is still in use. I worked from 1990 to 2015 or so at a company that had inherited it's systems from a prior owner of itself, and had no choice but to use the ancient software, So CICS & multiple mainframe systems were 'it'. Many of them were in process of being migrated in bits & pieces to PC alternatives, but it was extremely messy. However if something works it is not in the interests of a corporation to get rid of it to satisfy the ambitions of younger IT people - the business is all that counts, as it should be ! Having a master plan to roll over to more modern concepts is the way to go, but in my experience those with the control over such things are not necessarily the people who have enough knowledge to make those choices - hence the stalemate & lack of a coherent plan. IOW 'nobody listens to me' is the problem !
It is a testament to an older age of IBM that CICS has stood the test of time and that it is still doing what is needed some 50 years later. If it is still supported, works as needed and costs less than moving to something new then stick with it.
The company I work for is having SAP inflicted upon it by the corporate overlords BUT they are moving to SAP version+1 with a different EPDM front end (windchill rather than cideon) next year so we will then go through another transition...
I used to work for a company where I'm sure one of the board members thought "big companies use Oracle, we are a big company, we should use Oracle". After 5 years, untold airmiles moving people around the world for training and brainstorming and a lot of money they rolled it out to ONE site before the project died.
>one of the board members thought "big companies use Oracle, we are a big company, we should use Oracle"
Way back I had a client who was a successful mortgage broker handling >£100M of funds. Their datacenter was a rack of NetWare servers, the plan in-progress was to replace these with a microvax cluster. The business wanting to improve their image with their City customers (who provided the monies for the mortgage products) recruited a new CEO from the City. One of the new CEO's first dictates was that the IT should be replaced by a suitably large IBM system... I seem to remember the company disappeared a few years later...
Remember the London Ambulance Service fiasco[1]? That was an attempt to do serious, real world, realtime transaction processing using something other than CICS as the TPM to manage it. A highly regarded product which IBM had bought out to do the job, as "open systems" was a "must have" in the contract so they couldn't use big iron to do it properly[1].
The fix adopted was to give up on the new fangled stuff and port CICS to UNIX...
[1] Nothing really qualifies as a fiasco without quantifiable deaths.
[2] Correct lesson to learn here is: Never let some evangelical dickhead specify the hardware, no matter how on trend they are...
A longstanding mainframe application was cloned onto a hybrid stack, using a Linux front end, Windows application tier running Microfocus, AIX data tier.
It ran well enough apart from the move having exposed the number of data calls happening (internally on the mainframe) across the network.
There was no real reason for the replatform aside from a CIO who had decided "no more new mainframe projects" and had that that adopted as a principle before leaving.
Usually the issue is the age of the code (and the coders) not the platform. Ropy old code written for green screen remains so when ported.
z/OS is called "closed source" for a reason, there's no way of making something run like an IBM mainframe without doing it the way that mainframe does it.
Ironically, I seem to remember Micro Focus doing a form of IBMs' VM-CMS many years ago (pre-1996!) - I was working at an IBM-only place and we were looking to see if some of the processing could be shifted off the mainframe.
Sadly, the '99% compatibility' excluded one of the main things we wanted it for' (can't remember what - lots of miles and alcohol since then!)
The UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 section 50B [legislation.gov.uk] which allows reverse engineering for interoperability and explicitly says: "Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A, void)", is going to likely make this an interestingly expensive case.
The complaint filing seems to be specifically targeting Micro Focus Inc (the US subsidiary of Micro Focus plc) and its distribution of certain products to New York-based companies.
A win for IBM would I suspect mean US law trumps UK law, when it comes to products being distributed (ie. not necessarily directly sold to US-base companies).
US law is the same -- specifically to protect third-party automobile compatibility. (Americans take their cars seriously). The restrictions aren't on intent or outcome or contract: the restrictions (as in this case) are on direct copying.
One of the most nonsensical things I've seen is moving technology needlessly or for political talking points. It's stupid.
70-80% of the words database on mainframe db2. All the top fortune companies use it. The only reason I can discern for the move is everyone wanted a piece of the IBM pie. IBM messed this up by not taking a different tack, but that's water under the bridge.
The next generation of technologists will be wealthy if they learn mainframe, along with the toy software. zExplore (formerly Master the Mainframe) is the key.
CICS dates (originally) from the days when I/O in COBOL mean I) Read a punched card O)Write a line of text to a line printer.
So the concept of a dumb terminal, whose input changed between reads and a screen you re-wrote sections of, was clearly the devils work.
Hence CICS exists to put a punched-card-and-line-printer wrapper on these new-fangled dumb terminals and their meatsack operators. And random access storage devices How is that even possible?
And yes it is a key enabling part of a lot of mainframe based businesses, including banking but also (or it used to be) the various catalogue shopping companies (maximum reliability, minimum cost per transaction).
Some say it's only Micro Focus's unswerving support for mainframes (especially of the IBM variety) that's kept them in the game for large organisations, but that may be an exaggeration.
So I guess they'd be even more p**sed at the company that installed the mother of TSRs on their shiny new Z/os box then? But that's a story for another day.
If this was in the UK, I doubt IBM would win given this precedent:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitaire_Inc_v_Easyjet_Airline_Co._and_BulletProof_Technologies,_Inc.
However, as it's being heard in the US, who knows what will happen - the only certainty is enriched lawyers.
" Curiously, it was not claimed that Defendant had access to the original source code or that Defendant's source code resembled Plaintiff's in any way"
So, not in any way comparable to this case. The pivotal points of this case are the claim that the defendant had developer access and that the software is a derivative work
So, did developers have access to source code? Yes. Look at the background:
"Because of the limited capacity of even large processors of that era every CICS installation was required to assemble the source code for all of the CICS system modules after completing a process similar to system generation (sysgen), called CICSGEN, to establish values for conditional assembly-language statements. "
CICS source code moved from "partly developed by customers", to "implemented and debugged by customers" to "partly developed, implemented and debugged by licensed developers"
IBM and Micro Focus have long history as the best of frenemies. In the early 90s they co-operated very closely on CICS-OS2 - IBM provided the CICS and MF brought the COBOL compiler and run-time for X86. When Enterprise Server first started being sold as a way to lift and shift from the mainframe to lower-cost platforms Micro Focus ended up in IBM's cross hairs for several years.
I don't know how IBM as an institution could claim to have "only become recently aware" of the situation. I think the poster who said this is a lot to do with Micro Focus partnering with AWS has hit the nail on the head. The last time IBM were this cross with Micro Focus it was because of a close relationship with Microsoft. IBM here has all the hallmarks of the abusive ex...
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In 1995 I installed and configured CICS/6000 on AIX (not my normal DBA job but they had no one else who could spell CICS available). My impression was that the CICS port was written by MicroFocus. I seem to recall Microfocus copyright notices coming up with the IBM ones. Maybe I'm wrong but this case is a little weird to me.
According to a blog entry by Mark J. Barrenechea, OpenText's CEO & CTO, regarding IBM's complaint the "Southern District of New York has just issued an Order, dismissing the breach of contract claim altogether."
I cannot find any reference to the order or indeed the case itself on the court's website but that may just be my lack of navigational skills or familiarity with legal terminology.
There remains Count I, the copyright infringment.
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