The famous American insularity has been strongly to the fore in all the analysis of the arbitration settlement between IBM and Fujitsu Ltd, the argument being that since US IBM users say they would not run their business under any operating system other than the Real Thing from IBM, the subject of competition is a dead issue – but such analysis ignores the fact that Japanese users have long thrived on copies of IBM operating systems, and that Siemens AG had some very satisfied customers for Fujitsu’s OSIV/F4 version of MVS, including the mighty Datev AG bureau for tax accountants, and only stopped marketing it when it began to fear that its customers might be confronted with lawsuits from IBM alleging that they were using pirated software.
