Software company sues IBM, Red Hat, claims they ‘conspired’ to ‘crush’ competitors
Lauren Ohnesorge, 01 April 2021
A software firm is suing Red Hat and its parent company, IBM, claiming they “conspired to illegally corner a market and crush competition.”
In a copyright infringement and antitrust lawsuit filed Wednesday in a district court in the Virgin Islands, software firm Xinuous claims IBM “stole” its intellectual property “and used that stolen property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuous itself.”
“Xinuos’s copyright allegations merely rehash the stale claims of its predecessor, whose copyrights Xinuos purchased out of bankruptcy – and have no merit,” said Doug Shelton, an IBM spokesperson. “Xinuos’s antitrust allegations, brought against IBM and Red Hat… similarly defy logic. IBM and Red Hat will aggressively defend the integrity of the open-source development process and the inherent choice, and thus competition, that open-source fosters.”
The lawsuit, filed by attorney J. Daryl Dodson of Moore, Dodson & Russell, claims IBM and Red Hat, after allegedly copying software code related to its Unix-based system, used their market powers to “victimize” consumers and competition. Then, according to the lawsuit, IBM acquired Red Hat “to solidify and make permanent their scheme.”
In a statement included in a press release about the lawsuit, Sean Snyder, president and CEO of Xinuous said the case was about “market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community and innovation itself.”
Snyder was not available to comment further, according to a Xinuous spokeswoman.
