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IBM announces lawsuit against Apple for hiring chip designer

Mike Brown Contributing Reporter Neowin · Oct 31, 2008 18:56 EDT · Hot! with 13 comments

One of IBM's highly-regarded chip experts has become the centre of a lawsuit between Apple and IBM, after accepting a job offer from Apple. IBM's claim is that working for Apple is a violation of his contract with IBM which states that he is forbidden from working for a rival company if he leaves.

IBM believes that Mark Papermaster will be a valuable addition to the team working on the Xblade range of servers produced by Apple, which would go in direct competition with IBM's own offerings. Beefed-up Xblade servers would also directly benefit Apple which, with it's iTunes store and MobileMe services, is making far more of an effort in recent years to increase it's market share of internet-based services.