Marimba Inc told us on Tuesday that Novadigm Inc’s patent claim had no bearing on its submission of the DRP Distribution and Replication Protocol to the World Wide Web Consortium W3C for use as a proposed standard for software distribution (CI No 3,233). Yesterday it re-iterated that there is no issue here, (see separate story in this section). CEO Kim Polese told us Novadigm’s claims are baseless and completely without merit. Their patent simply does not apply to Castanet [Marimba’s product], and furthermore, allegations by Novadigm that the DRP submission may overlap with Novadigm’s technology by including similar techniques amounts to nothing more than a vague and groundless conjecture. Unfortunately for the industry, the filing of frivolous lawsuits such as this one is a common tactic often used by firms that have failed to execute in the marketplace and resort to filing baseless claims in order to try to succeed in the courts.
