IBM's Patent Pledge Ripples Open Sourcers

January 13, 2005
IBM's Patent Pledge Ripples Open Sourcers
By Jim Wagner

UPDATED: Reaction to IBM's (Quote, Chart) pledge to free 500 of its software patents to the open source community has varied, ranging from praise to panning the software patent process itself. But what effect does this pledge really have on the developers who are writing code and the software world in general?
The Armonk, N.Y., IT giant announced Tuesday it was allowing the free use of 500 of its patents -- ranging from storage management to image processing to compression, encryption and access control -- for any developer, as long as they published the source code under one of the 50 certified open source licenses at the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
Officials said it was the company's first step in an effort to spur new ideas in the software community through collaboration and shared knowledge, and called on other intellectual property holders to join their "patent commons." Skeptics argued it was proof the patent process was broken.
Speculation abounds over IBM's ulterior motive for its philanthropic gesture. Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, said on his blog that the move is part of Big Blue's "broader strategy to commoditize their inputs, pool risk, leverage a lead in services and change the game."
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