IBM Eye

So how does one of the most aggressive patent filing companies in the world foster open source development, while also profiting from the investment in research and development of the technology?

Karen Lowry Miller from Newsweek writes The Big Blue Yonder

By giving away hundreds of its patents, IBM has turned a philosophical movement into a tangible business strategy. The company with the most to lose is Microsoft. A close-up look at the software war.

By the time Sam Palmisano took over as CEO of IBM in 2002, the technology giant had become the undisputed king of patents. Each year it files more than 3,000 patents, more than any other company. And yet IBM had also begun to present a very different face to the world—as the leading proponent of so-called open-source software, a communal body of code that individuals and companies develop at their own expense and then share with each other freely. How far should IBM go in sharing its software innovations? Would the company also be giving away its technological advantage? Likewise, would clinging to its treasure chest of patents make it harder to foster the kind of open collaboration IBM wants, dooming the company to irrelevance?

A very interesting article looking at how IBM is walking a fine line between profiting from its patented technology, while at the same time fostering open source development and “bigger picture” efforts that go beyond IBM’s bottom line, and more towards a concept of the “greater good”.

For example “IBM made 500 software patents available last January to developers working on open-source projects. Then on Oct. 24, the company offered all its patents royalty-free to anyone designing standards for the health and education industries.”

It’s a mixed model that seems to be working well - but it will be interesting to see how this impacts the company’s profitability long term, and at the same time, how it impacts the software industry as a whole.