Quote:
Originally Posted by 5thWiggle
IBM sued other companies over its BIOS as well and won. It wasn't until Phoenix proved they used a "clean room" approach and software engineers with no knowledge of IBM BIOS source code to reverse engineer the BIOS that IBM clones could be built.
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My recollection is Compaq did it first.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/d...able-Computer/
Phoenix was the first to *license* an IBM-compatible BIOS to all comers.
IBM, on the other hand, never sued over trade dress or trivialities they *knew* they would lose, just to bleed the smaller company out of the market.
Few companies are that petty.
(Shrug)
Not all lawsuits are unwarranted, but suing for every conceivable reason does lead to a fair amount of unwarranted and losing suits.