jonathan schwartz wrote in his blog: “Communities and kernels and individuals without assets are not useful targets for IBM-style corporate litigation.”

that’s just one of the things that make the open-source, peer-to-peer, unstructured communities becoming stronger day by day. the big ones keep spending millions and billions suing each other (remember the sun-microsoft court fights?), making settlements (sun got $2G from microsoft, paid $92M to kodak), and buying into smaller ones (sun bought star division, the makers of staroffice, to compete with microsoft) — all in order to keep bits of intellectual property under their control.

they can kill each other but they cannot kill the network. think about asymmetric warfare.