Earlier this week it was made public that IBM had levied patent infringement allegations against French company TurboHercules and its mainframe emulator. A letter signed by IBM VP and technology officer Mark S. Anzani and addressed to TurboHercules co-founder Roger Bowler detailed the more than 170 patents the company allegedly infringed upon.

[…] IBM has sent a nastygram to the company TurboHercules, with a “non-exhaustive” list of US patents that it believes “will be infringed” by TurboHercules' code.

An analysis combining Ubuntu's relationship with Microsoft proxies such as Yahoo! search and Mono; more on how TurboHercules may be connected to Microsoft and why IBM's response was tactless

IBM is threatening to pursue legal action against TurboHercules, a company that sells services relating to the open source Hercules project, an emulator that allows conventional computers with mainstream operating systems to run software that is designed for IBM System Z mainframe hardware.

War is peace and Microsoft is the new "open". Details on the latest attack of Microsoft against GNU/Linux, using proxies

Microsoft partners continue to attack GNU/Linux (on IBM mainframes) for its dominance that poses a threat to Windows Server

In 2005, IBM pledged to not use five hundred patents against open source software. In 2010, two of those patents have shown up in a letter from IBM to the makers of TurboHercules, an open source mainframe emulator

IBM snubbed a request from the British founder of TurboHercules SAS to let it offer a disaster recovery product for IBM mainframe users and instead accused the French open source startup of violating its intellectual property.

The undeclared war between the Microsoft and the European Union has been relatively quiet for the past few months; we haven't heard much from either party since the EU fined Microsoft $1.36 billion. The scarcely settled cauldron between the two organizations, however, is about to receive a good stirring, due to the actions of EU Parliment representative and Green Party member, Heide Rühle.