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IBM Grants Universal and Perpetual Access To IP
StonyandCher writes "IBM is making it easier to utilize its patented intellectual property to implement nearly 200 standards in the SOA, Web services, security and other spaces. Under a pledge issued by the company Wednesday, IBM is granting universal and perpetual access to intellectual property that might be necessary to implement standards designed to make software interoperable. IBM will not assert any patent rights to its technologies featured in these standards. The company believes its move in this space is the largest of its kind."
The logical second step would be to Open Source their offerings, so developers can enhance them without fear. Will Lotus Notes on Linux be open sourced? What about Websphere? Mere lifting of patent threats on XML, SOAP etc. is only a half-hearted measure.
Still, it is quite a big step in the right direction though, kudos to IBM for that!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
In most other industries and in fact in other parts of the IT industry you are mandated to do that as a part of the standards process. At the very least you have to guarantee that you will offer your IP on non-discriminatory terms.
It is entertaining to see SOA getting to its supposedly standard and uberinteroperable status without anyone paying attention to this minute IP detail. Entertaining, but not surprising. If you actually can read a SOA spec, comprehend it entirety and have some functioning brain cells left after that you are mad anyway. Every time I have to read Xpath or god forbid one of the WS security or addressing space specs I remember Dijkstra. He was absolutely right:
b> The problems of business administration in general and data base management in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English. Still right today. Just change data base management for interoperability and you got a description of WS/SOAP and the rest of that standard ilk.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
May I be the first to welcome our Robot Overlords(tm)?
1) invent thing
2) Patent it
3) Release patent for general use
4) Profit..????
Imagine a beowulf cluster of patent officers!!!
This may be a bad thing, as the IP/patent system is becoming so broken that a fix will be required. But acts like this may prolong the status quo as supporters of the current system can point to this example and say "Look, the system balances itself." Personally, I wouldn't rely too much on the kindness of large corporations (or small ones).
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
"The company believes its move in this space is the largest of its kind."
:)
If the definition of 'move' and 'space' mean that certain baseline/root information was made available in a manner that meant both easier access and freedom to use it, with the expectation that such a move would foster more information and more giving, etc. etc, I contend that when the printing press was unleashed, a much larger move occurred, in a similar place.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not chipping on IBM, but if you are doing good for goods' sake, then do it, but please try to leave out the part where you paint yourself up as all warm and fuzzy and giving
Is the truth about Imaginary Property finally beating the hype? IBM are at once acutely aware of the problems and the company most responsible for the current situation with software patents, they can obviously see the writing on the wall.
In light of recent rulings, I'd like to see other companies do to do the right thing and lay down their arms.
The summary is a bit light on details so I can't figure out what tech they are providing to Universal and Perpetual. Uh, wait..
How is it that IBM patents have stood in the way of Microsoft quixotic attempts at security?
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is the payback for the "User Product" language in part 6 of GPL3 ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html ) - which seems to be aimed at making GPL software cooptable for purely business purposes.
The more rational side of me observes that IBM probably sees itself writing the business logic side of the web services architecture in the future, and doesn't really care much who wrote the middleware so long as it just works. Letting people write middleware without fear of IP lawsuits would tend to facilitate this.
sigs are hazardous to your health
To make SOA and web services workable, governance is a neccessary evil allowing for SLA's to be 'stapled' to a service, especially true when the service gets a new version and breaks exisiting consuming applications ...
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BitTorrent has already been providing universal access to IP since 2001. Nice try, IBM!
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
/me is glad to see this. It might mean better driver functionality for older IBMs and maybe some Lenovo machines.
Making standards easier to apply is always a good thing, but IMHO for a standard to make sense it's even more important to force people to actually implement it properly and in a conforming way. Which brings me to the licensing terms of Adobe's PDF stuff, which can be freely implemented as long as the implementation strictly follows the standard. In the same vein, it might have been a good idea to add a constraint to the license that makes the free use of IBM's IP only available to people who strictly adhere to the standard. Everybody else who thinks they have a good reason for adding their own "extensions" would have to fill out forms like it used to be and maybe have to make any documentation and patent portfolio regarding their changes freely available.
As a result, people would either have to follow the standard or at least provide documentation and patent licenses to guarantee some degree of interoperability, in order to prevent things like Microsoft's bastardization of Kerberos.
But I'm neither a patent lawyer nor do I have any special insight into licensing deals, so if this idea is stupid then please feel free to point out any potential issues you might see.
:/- spoon(_).
According to your link, he spend 17 years at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell (around 9 years each). They don't seem to have ever been part of Big Blue (at least according to their wiki pages), so thanks for the irrelevant link.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
put your IP where your mouth is and make "interoperability" a fact and not a PR campaign.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
FTFA:
"IBM has provided a non-assertion statement that says people are free to use any of its patents needed to implement the standards, provided they do not sue IBM or anyone else over use of their own patents involved in implementing the standards." The important part is "provided they do not sue IBM or anyone else..." - think about it - MS get free use of IBM patents UNTIL they sue someone over the use of their patents cover the same technology (OOXML, anyone?). Then the jig is up, no more free ride. Its an economic incentive for MS to not sue. Nice job IBM!!!!
Is this "pledge" a PR release, or is it legally binding?
If new management comes into power at IBM can they suddenly just decide to rescind the pledge and nail people for IP infringement and demand royalties?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
You can't take it back when it's an official statement like this. Any attempt to enforce
at this point will go down in flames as it was done deliberately and with intent. Witness
what happened with SCO v. IBM when SCO ran that line of thought up the flagpole. AT&T had
sent out a similarly natured release stating the actual licensing intent- which was NOT the
interpretation SCO was trying to run up the flagpole and try to see if the Court saluted it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So what might the benefits befor IBM? Well, IBM probably realizes that, unlike Microsoft, they are not is a position to shove proprietary formats and "standards" down people's throat. If they were to introduce "standards" with patent-protected components, then the industry would just simply develop alternative solutions, thereby creating new standards that IBM would most likely end up having to adopt eventually. Making their IP available is nothing more than IBM's attempt to get their own formats accepted as the de-facto standards in the industry, which gives IBM a nice head-start over everybody else.
So with this, and the PR they get over this move, it seems like IBM does gain quite a bit from this step. That doesn't mean it isn't a good move for all of us (it is), but there you go.
As a child of I've Been Moved, I just have to say how nice this is. IBM is a wonderful company with a grand history. Like all successful companies, they have had their bad days. This is a great day for them.
Probably the best read on the subject right here: http://cafe.elharo.com/xml/north-and-south/
which implies all software is trivial
unless you are believe that noteworthy software advances are not patented
or that only trivial software innovation occurs
The thread has got lots of decent responses, and now it's marked Troll! The moderation system here stinks to high heavens, it's rubbish.
Ouch.
I must admit I was working from memory and I didn't check my own sources. Not sure where I got it from, a google search only gets a few dozen hits.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is the most significant development I've seen in IP practice for years. This is the largest of the corporate entities saying that IP-sharing is a good idea; they don't go full FOSS because that has them making costly products and giving them away for free, which doesn't work under capitalism. But they're approving the idea, and that will inspire others to follow their line of thinking.
technical writing / development
Why not just let the patent's slip then into the public domain? It costs a good bit, almost doubling each year that you renew a patent. So if they're allowing universal access the patents are then pretty much public domain except they can still say they are the owners. Sounds like they virtually GPL'd their patents :)
Their free offering is like the pirated copies of Photoshop. It's there to get users who could never buy their products become familiar with it. The big guys didn't drop the commercial version for the free one and when the small shops become big ones, they'll hopefully move to the expensive offering.
Let me put it plainly -- if I had the pure skills to implement the full stack which underpin IBM's web-related solutions at an extremely high level, I would be making well into the six digits in terms of income (in USD), and IBM's markup on me would push the cost to client companies to around double or triple that amount. Multiple "me" by around ten thousand bodies or more and you can see how it makes sense for IBM to be on the forefront of interoperability technology because that is where the $$ is at.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Everyone: Ok IBM, I guess then you'll be signing those patents over to the FSF?
IBM: Oh uh wait a minute, not we uh...well... this is a gesture and we want to retain our patents just in case we uh need to exercise our rights and uh but everyone is safe you know...IBM couldn't say one thing and then do another cause that would just be a bad thing for our image that would take days for people to forget.
I call bullshit.
You raise some good points but I think the "dwindling mindshare" and "marketshare" is a reach.
It is true that if you open source a product so that anyone can download it and try it out you remove barriers which will probably increase your market penetration. But a free trial of proprietary code can do much the same, giving people the chance to test drive before committing to a monetary investment.
Don't get me wrong. I prefer the open source business model. It feels friendlier and makes me feel that the product is going to be there for me unlike some proprietary products that went away after the company that produced them went out of business or just lost interest in supporting them any longer. But I don't look at the proprietary business model with distain either. Give me choices and I'll choose what works for me.
Opening your source is a very cheap way to advertise. You don't lose anything and the work and cost involved is minimal usually (unless your code includes lots of licensed code from others). For IBM it probably doesn't matter but for small companies it can be significant to have such a cheap means of advertisement.
Even if I know about a proprietary program I could use I'll make every effort to avoid it unless it's open source. I experience major issues almost daily with proprietary software and I have no desire to add to my list of woes. The worst is that when you get into expensive business applications the vendors often won't tell you basic things about how to use and manage the software because they want to sell you expensive support services, training, and upgrades. At least with the source code it'd be possible to figure things out, fix bugs, and produce our own add-ons without extensive to reverse engineering.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Dont wory about it. I know I've been sure of something wrong before a few times.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
I believe it is insightful.
Because discussion of ideas is what advance knowledge.
Closing the source advances nobody but the software manufacturer, and in many situations, not even they benefit from this kind of licensing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.