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IBM frees 500 patentsIBM frees 500 patentsPosted Jan 11, 2005 16:16 UTC (Tue) by jd (guest, #26381)Parent article: IBM frees 500 patents This may seem an extraordinary move by IBM, but really it fits their past patterns of behaviour remarkably well. They have released more software to the Free/Open Source Community than any other company. Ok, they rarely maintain any of it, they tend to abandon projects half-way through, those that are any good (eg: Postfix) they spin off, etc. But the code is out there. Probably the only projects I actually respect IBM for are their JDK, Jikes (an alternative Java compiler), their GPLing of their JFS filesystem, and their work on porting Linux to their mainframes. But that's a tiny, tiny fraction of what's offered on their Open Source website. Most of the rest is abandonware, and they don't even list all of that. What does this mean? Well, it means that I think that IBM genuinely wants to invest in Open Source, but doesn't really know how to, so throws out a lot of stuff to see what happens. I believe this is what happened here. They don't really understand how to invest, or what to invest in, in this new area, so they'll scatter round a total random mix of stuff. If you look at the patents, there's no obvious aim to them. There's some caching and pipelining stuff, some graphics, some crypto, some filesystem stuff, etc. They're not targetting any specific group (though the processor stuff will likely be welcome by the Open Cores folks) and there's no indication that they'll follow-up on anything they've handed out. But, at the end of the day, does that matter? Do we NEED vast amounts of extra help? Or are the scattered seeds of ideas from IBM sufficient? My guess is that it'll turn out to be the latter, and IBM will actually be seen as having done a lot of good by not trying to guide things too much. I hope SGI - the only other company that can compare with IBM on the enormity of their contributions - releases some of the IP they have. Now that they're not so heavily into graphics workstations, I'm sure there is something in their portfolio that is no longer useful to them, but would be useful to the community at large, and maybe even useful to SGI to release.
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No, IBM has not released the most open source software Posted Jan 11, 2005 17:43 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Red Hat, Sun, and Netscape/AOL all have released more free software to the community than IBM (whether counted as lines of code or by the value of the code). IBM has certainly made significant contributions, of course.
IBM frees 500 patents Posted Jan 11, 2005 18:09 UTC (Tue) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] I don't see this as IBM doesn't know how to invest Open Source, some ofthe software is abandonware just because that particular project has ended and doesn't have more funding so they throw the code out and hope that somebody else maintains it in the case they will need/use it again. IMHO Open Sourcing is also a nice way to share code *within* a company. Intranet search engines usually suck pretty badly even in big companies. If you throw the code out, other people within the company can find it through Google... ;-)
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