As I promised in a previous post, here are more links to the story that broke today about how IBM has made a pledge of open access to 500 patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. Here is some of the text from the press release:
IBM today pledged open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property (IP) portfolio.
The pledge is applicable to any individual, community, or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open source software now or in the future.
IBM intends for this pledge to form the basis of an industry-wide “patent commons” in which patents are used to establish a platform for further innovations in areas of broad interest to information technology developers and users.
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Open source software, based on collaborative innovation among developers around the world, is gaining significant marketplace momentum. IBM believes the patents it is opening up to open source developers will help foster continued innovation. They also can contribute to open standards and broader interoperability between applications by providing open source developers with a solid base of innovation they can use and share.
To be clear, this is not a “donation,” but rather a pledge of the patents to seed and then maintain a patent commons for open source projects. The details are in the patent description document. We hope that this action will stimulate discussion about the changing nature of innovation and the new collaboration models enabled by the Internet and realized in the thousands of open source projects around the world. Of course, we also hope others will join us by similarly pledging patents to the commons.
The opinions expressed in the following are those of the authors and the organizations for which they work …
