TurboHercules, a privately held company headquartered in Paris filed a formal complaint today against IBM with the European Commission(EC)’s Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP) in Brussels.

The company was formed in 2009 to offer a commercial solution based on the Hercules open-source project. . TurboHercules claims that Big Blue is tying IBM’s mainframe OS with its own hardware depriving clients of the right to use Hercules , an open-source mainframe emulator developed in Europe and maintained by a global volunteer community over the past 10 years.

Roger Bowler, the original developer of the Hercules open-source project and the Chairman of TurboHercules said , ”TurboHercules decided to file its complaint after it became apparent to the company that IBM's efforts to protect its mainframe monopolies extended to open-source solutions. TurboHercules is by no means anti-IBM. We originally wrote to IBM requesting that it license its mainframe operating system to customers, on reasonable and fair terms, for use with Hercules in certain circumstances. Not only did IBM deny our request, but it now suddenly claims, after ten years, that the Hercules open-source emulator violates IBM intellectual property that it has refused to identify. We then realized that our only hope as a small company was to file a complaint with the European Commission."

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