Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

IBM settles $400 million to Compuware

Filed under
Hardware
Legal

In the end, a jury of eight won't deliberate the trade secrets case between Compuware Corp. and IBM Corp.

But jurors in the 3-year-old case, which culminated in a $400-million settlement late Monday night, said Tuesday that the weight of evidence so far made them side with Compuware.

IBM had yet to present.

A legal expert said that isn't a surprise five weeks into the trial, because IBM hadn't started presenting its case.

Still, jurors said, Compuware's testimony and evidence proved compelling amid dense technical testimony and evidence in the software trial.
Presenting highly technical evidence to jurors -- as opposed to having a bench trial -- can be risky, said Christopher Peters, associate law professor at Wayne State University Law School, so the evidence pointing to what is right and wrong needs to be compelling.

In this case, U.S. District Judge George Steeh told jurors that their presence in the court helped the two sides reach a settlement.

"The differences were great. The only impetus to bring these folks together was the fact that the ax was going to fall on somebody's head and it was getting close," he told the jury Tuesday morning. "And you're the ax."

The jurors were asked to decide whether IBM had coerced former Compuware employees to share information about Compuware products to develop competing software and try to price Compuware out of the market.

Beyond what the products do -- the software in question manages data and diagnoses glitches in IBM mainframes -- jurors heard technical jargon, such as the computer language that makes the building blocks of the software.

"The first week, I was lost," said Anthony Stella, 39, of Chesterfield Township. But it got easier, he said.

Edwina Garnett, 47, of Detroit said the attorneys' efforts to repeat information helped her understand the case. "After hearing it over and over, you see how things kind of tie in," she said.

Still, a highly technical case offering complicated data to a jury can be a risk, said Albert Scherr, a professor at the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H.

"There's a risk on each side that the jury isn't going to be able to understand enough of the evidence well enough," Scherr said.
But a jury also can pay off, if attorneys bring morality into it.

"If you have a case that is based at least as much on general equity or the general idea that you're a good guy and the other side is a bad guy, you might want a jury even if the case involves a lot of technical evidence," Peters said.

So far, jurors said, that was the type of testimony that proved most compelling in the case.

Jurors pointed to testimony from a Compuware technical expert who said the similarities between the two companies' products could not have been an accident. E-mails that jurors saw from former Compuware employees talking about their old company's products also were convincing, jurors said.

Adding it all up, juror Sarah Hamady said the case boiled down to deciding between right and wrong. "A lot of the stuff they were going over was almost common sense: Is this right? Was this ethical? Should companies be allowed to do that?"

Source.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.