IBM opens 500 patents to royalty free use

Posted on 11 Jan 2005 at 15:12

IBM has backed up its promise to support open source through its patent portfolio by opening up a list of 500 for royalty free use by open source developers.

The company stated back in August at LinuxWorld that it would not press infringement proceedings gainst open source products that trod on its patent toes.

But by opening up these 500 patents, it says it taking the first steps towards the creation of a patent commons - a pool of patents pledged for free use by the open source community - and hopes other companies will follow.

'This is not a one-time event,' said Dr. Kelly. 'While IBM will continue to demonstrate leadership in patent output, through measures such as today's pledge, we will increasingly use patents to encourage and protect global innovation and interoperability through open standards and we urge others to do so as well.'

The 500 patents up for grabs will make little impact in IBM's mammoth portfolio, reported to be as great as 40,000. As it has done for the past 12 consecutive years, Big Blue once again topped the patent hit parade for 2004 with 3,248 new additions.

The patents now available to the open source community range from memory management and multi-processing to video, compression and ecommerce.

However, while the Open Source Initiative, which manages the open source licences under which the patents will be available, welcomed the move, it is unclear quite how much of this is posturing at the expense of Microsoft. Some rumour that IBM's move towards supporting the Linux operating system is actually a bid to drag the value out of the operating system and move it further up the stack to applications that sit on top.

Many open source proponents, particularly in Europe, are vehemently opposed to software patents in the first place - whether or not they are made available to open source developers.

James Heald of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure said: 'At the most basic level, this is obviously a good thing for OSS projects, because here are 500 patents OSS developers no longer have to worry about.

'But it's unfortunate that software patents exist, that this sort of gracious permission is even necessary.

'And it unfortunately does nothing to protect OSS and SMEs from patent attack from other companies out there, who may not share IBM's interests in promoting Open Source. Ultimately this is at best only a sideshow.'

IBM is a million miles from aligning with that perspective.

It said in a statement: 'While IP ownership is an essential driver of innovation, technological advances are often dependent on shared knowledge, standards, and collaborative innovation. IBM's IP framework enables both while protecting truly new, novel and useful inventions.'

Indeed patents aren't going to go away. And perhaps a shared commons is the best way for the open source world to address the patent question. When we previously asked open source leader Bruce Perens whether some centralised body would be necessary to manage the patents available to open source developers he disagreed. He told us the idea had already been suggested several times but that it had run into difficulties over agreeing exactly who or what that should be.

The full list of patents is available at the IBM website.