Whirlwind06 said:
If I understand it correctly the first gen Sigma was so close to Glock that S&W was sued by Glock and lost.
Not quite, but that is how most online versions of the story go...
In reality, nobody besides Smith & Wesson or Glock knows the exact details because it was settled out of court, and neither company has ever shared specific details.
Rumor has it that Smith & Wesson paid Glock royalties on the SIGMA Series right up until the release of the Gen 4 SD Series which was redesigned as part of an agreement, but that doesn't add up because the SD still shares all of the major similarities between the SIGMA and Glock.
Another rumor with a bit more validity to it is that the SIGMA was never in fact similar enough to the Glock to infringe on any of their patents, but Glock jumped the gun and filed a lawsuit they couldn't win and upon closer inspection discovered this, prompting them to issue an ultimatum to a wide array of retailers that if they carried the SIGMA, then Glock would cease to do business with them. Supposedly this worked, and a lot of big retailers wouldn't even carry the SIGMA, so eventually Smith & Wesson approached Glock, offering them a settlement so that Glock would lift the ultimatum.
But rumors are just that... Hearsay, speculation, and often times outright conjecture. There are all sorts of wild theories on what actually happened, including a particularly ludicrous one which gets repeated quite often that SIGMAs have heavy triggers because of said lawsuit, either because of changes S&W made to address patent infringement or because Glock essentially forced S&W to make the trigger excessively heavy in order to make it less desirable. Meanwhile, in reality, the trigger on the Gen 1 SW40F was actually worse than later post-settlement models, so that theory is complete nonsense, but people quote it as truth all the time.