IBM will begin allowing the use of 500 technologies covered by patents it holds by developers working on open source projects. While IBM will not forfeit the patents, it will seek no licensing fees from groups that use them on projects that meet a definition by the Open Source Initiative. Despite past donations of intellectual property to open source groups, the new program is seen as a fundamental shift in the company's approach because unlike those donations, this one does not hold the potential to harm IBM's competitors. The 500 patents that will be available involve 14 categories of technology and do not target any specific open source project. IBM said it hopes to create a "patent commons," including the initial 500 as well as other patents, that other companies could join. IBM's new approach to managing its intellectual property, however, has not diminished its pursuit of new patents. IBM, which is the world's largest patent holder, collected 3,248 new patents in 2004, 1,300 more than Matsushita Electric Industrial, which had the second-highest tally for the year. New York Times, 11 January 2005 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/technology/11soft.html
Barry Mahon wrote:
IBM will begin allowing the use of 500 technologies covered by patents it holds by developers working on open source projects. [...]
It's difficult to know how to respond to this. Accepting this offer essentially means accepting software idea patents. Although they may be offering these 500 "technologies", they're still getting almost 9 new patents a day on average: If you accept the validity of the 500 patents, presumably you must also implicitly accept the validity of their other patents.
I think the best approach may still be *not* to do a patent search before releasing your software and *not* to acknowledge these IBM patents, as doing so implies that you should be aware of any patents you are infringing, which apparently makes you more liable.
David
David O'Callaghan said:
It's difficult to know how to respond to this. Accepting this offer
essentially means accepting software idea patents. Although they may be offering these 500 "technologies", they're still getting almost 9 new patents a day on average: If you accept the validity of the 500 patents, presumably you must also implicitly accept the validity of their other patents.
Your advice is probably right. However, IBM is no longer the bad boy of the industry. The manner in which it is defending itself against SCO (i.e. fighting it tooth-and-nail rather than just buying SCO and putting it out of its misery) has highlighted that free software is likely an important investment to it. Also, this is hot on the heels of Novell announcing that it will use its patent portfolio to protect free software projects from aggression in that area ("Wanna sue GNOME for violating your 'double-click' patent? Gotta come through us first!"). I strongly suspect that we'll be seeing more moves from these two away from traditional software patent management during 2005.
I can see three groups in the pro-software patent lobby: Those who haven't taken the time out to consider the subtleties; those who are in the pockets (in one way or another) of the big industry players; and those big industry players. The latter group wants to inhibit free software development and deployment so that it's no longer a threat to their business models. The other groups know little about this and care less. Novell and IBM are beginning the process of educating these two groups in the hope, I suppose, of winning over those who haven't taken the time out to consider the subtleties.
Éibhear