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IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com)
IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger spoke at the Open Source Business Conference, and News.com was there. "'A big part of your power is to have your people work with the communities and donate some of your intellectual property to those communities so they can get better. Then you build proprietary offerings on top of the open-source platform,' he said. 'Those proprietary offerings at some point will lose their value as proprietary offerings. Then there probably will be more value donating it to an open-source community, and on and on and on.'"
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IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 7, 2005 0:01 UTC (Thu) by hmmm (guest, #28931) [Link] IBM "gets it". Wish I could say the same for Schwartz.
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 7, 2005 1:06 UTC (Thu) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link] From the article:When it comes to legal actions, IBM also is mixed. The company permits use of 500 patents for open-source projects, but continues to win more patent awards than any competitor.IBM is not a person, nor is it a monolith. There are competing interests in IBM, and the push for patents within IBM does not help us.
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 7, 2005 3:06 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] Even were IBM an individual, individuals can differ on some aspects of an issue while agreeing on others. IBM could feel that patents are a good strategy for excluding other proprietary vendors from taking advantage of one's research while that software is only available from proprietary sources. Or it could even feel that it is a legitimate way of protecting the early revenue from research which leads to a clever but transparent solution to a problem. A patent-heavy strategy does fit with the quoted statement: software loses its value as proprietary at the point when the patents on it expire, at which point you might as well open it rather than letting your commercial competitors develop other proprietary versions to compete with you.
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 8, 2005 23:19 UTC (Fri) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link] software loses its value as proprietary at the point when the patents on it expire,As a proprietary software developer in Europe, where tehre are currently no software patents, I tend to disagree. It really depends on software. As just a developer, who also uses OSS for school and hobby projects, I tend to think that any kind of patents on software are stiffing software development and even if they weren't, I believe that expiration dates impose a violent delay on development impulses, regardless of the OpenSourceness of the project.
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 8, 2005 23:21 UTC (Fri) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link] Sorry, my mistake. There are at least 30000 software patents in Europe, but currently they are not enforceable. Unfortunately there does exist "nonsoftware patents" that actually function as software patents and are enforceable, but that's a different topic.
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 9, 2005 5:35 UTC (Sat) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] I intended to say that software loses its proprietary value no sooner than the term of a patent (whether any patents are issued or permitted). After that many years, someone will have written code with the same function that works better without deriving it from the original implementation. Therefore, if patents are available, it makes more sense to get them than to care much about copyrights in all but the shortest term. And patents are particularly appropriate for the situation where a lot of expensive research is needed to discover some deep concept which you will then have to tell to all users of the program in order for them to understand how to use it; that is what patents were originally for. (On the other hand, I think that there is enough academic research and user-driven research in the field that the patent motive is counterproductive to getting research done.)
On the software patent issue, I think that it is becoming harder and harder for a patent not to be applicable to software, simply because hardware is becoming sufficiently general that whatever the patent says could be done in software without diverging from the claims. I think that the right solution increasingly has to be that software is exempt from infringing patents, no matter what they are, rather than prohibiting patents on software. Of course, a patent which specified that it was on software would be pretty useless, since it would not apply to anything that could infringe it; but a patent on something conventionally developed as software could still be useful for restricting, for example, hardware implementations of the same thing, while not applying to the normal case due to it being software.
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 7, 2005 10:56 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] If your competitors are using patents as weapons, you pretty much have to do the same, even if you disapprove and don't use them to extort money from your friends. Better a big strong friendly healthy giant in one's backyard, than a weak sick one and the unfriendly giants moving in for the kill.
The real fix needed is reform of the patent system so that software, except in extremely carefully delineated special cases, isn't patentable. Eventually the penny may drop, that the USA is harming its own interests, and helping those of Brazil, India, China, and various other still less friendly powers. (Ditto here in the EU if we don't beat off the proposed software patent directive).
IBM: Proprietary technology not enough (News.com) Posted Apr 7, 2005 11:34 UTC (Thu) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] " If your competitors are using patents as weapons, you pretty much have to do the same, "
I'm not sure how this applies as an argument. But let's say, that
Software patents may very well be the "right" thing in some situations.
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