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From: jangr@microsoft.UUCP (Jan Gray)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc
Subject: IBM Demands License Fees for RISC
Message-ID: <1591@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jul 88 21:02:13 GMT
Organization: Microsoft, Inc., Redmond, Washington
Lines: 40

[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