@cranioscopical: Yes, quite.
@40hz: If your optimistic thinking and your faith are rewarded in the fullness of time and shown by events to have accurately predicted the future for REXX, then that would run contrary to IBM's past corporate behaviours and strategems.
A brief review of IBM corporate strategy would generally indicate that nothing of commercial value to IBM was given up by or taken from IBM excepting by legal force - e.g., the antitrust legislation used against it in the '70s to force it to exit its monopoly position and sell off its computer bureau services arm (I recall that CDC bought that). For many years, IBM reputedly took out more patents each year than any other corporation on the planet. It would be incorrect to say that those patents were based on philanthropic objectives, or that IBM were doing that out of altruism or for the social good - commercial profit being the statutory driving objective for all corporations. Similarly, pharmaceutical corporations' patents, Monsanto's efforts to patent the food chain, and other corporations' efforts to patent the human genome.
