It’s amazing what people would try to patent ... and it’s even more amazing what gets past the examiners. IBM has managed to patent passing ipv6 or dhcp argument to indicate an IP host should network-boot over IPv6 or using DHCP. The idea is so trivial it’s almost not worth mentioning and goes along the lines of: “usually we use BOOTP and TFTP to get network boot parameters, but imagine we could pass DHCP as the argument to the boot routine and then it would use DHCP instead of BOOTP”.

The patent supposedly covers a very specific case, but (to my untrained eye) the claims are written in a way that could cover almost any IPv6- or DHCP-assisted network boot (or at least give lawyers plenty of stuff to charge for) ... exactly what we needed with all the other roadblocks and stumbling stones to IPv6 deployment.

Hat tip to John Curran for bringing this one to my attention.