This is huge for them, and also explains why they chose to stop bidding on the Nortel patents. This gives them big leverage against Oracle, who probably violate

This is huge for them, and also explains why they chose to stop bidding on the Nortel patents. This gives them big leverage against Oracle, who probably violate quite some patents with their hardware and also database business now, so cross licensing becomes possible. Same for Apple. IBM is happy to give some weapons to the Google "underdog" so that the "small" companies are busy fighting amongst themselves, while they themselves can't lose much. As others have noted, the patent system still sucks. But it is nice to see someone score a point who doesn't abuse it for maximum monetary gain and market share protection (hello Oracle, Apple).