Slashdot Log In
IBM Grants Universal and Perpetual Access To IP
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Jul 12, 2007 05:06 AM
from the free-at-last dept.
from the free-at-last dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Putting the cart in front of the donkey? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Maybe...maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Too slow! (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe add another clause? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it "logical" that IBM needs to open up their commercial products to entrench service standards? The standards should stand on their own. Open source products can embrace them regardless if commercial software remains closed.
Parent
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest and most commonly used 'product' to develop SOA-compliant applications is the JBoss stack - JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, JEMS for short. It is open source, and uses the Rosetta ESB for building SOA apps.
Despite it's open source nature, RedHat is making a pile of money on JBoss - from training, certifications, consulting, site implementations etc. In fact RedHat makes over a billion dollars a year, based purely on Open Source offerings. Commercial success and Open Source offerings aren't mutually exclusive - if IBM really believes in the Open Source philosophy, they ought to make their offerings Open Source, else they risk dwindling mindshare.... and unltimately marketshare as well.
Parent
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO, there are certainly advantages (as well as disadvantages) to being open source (depending on the project), but either way I think mindshare has a whole hell of a lot more to do with marketing than the open/closed nature of your product.
Parent
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought it was obvious. Why is Microsoft finding it difficult to retain "Devleopers, Developers and Developers"? Because their philosophy is Closed Source, and developers like to control their entire development environment - from the IDE to the compiler, to the authentication mechanism, the security model, the protocols, port numbers etc. Merely unencumbering a standard from patemts is only half the battle won - people will flock to an implementation of said standard that is patent unencumbered AND Open source at the same time.
Open sourcing a platform like Websphere or a collabarative suite like Lotus Notes will not be a commercial disaster, like the bloke who modded my original post 'Troll' seems to believe.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't think so. I believe it's because MS produces crappy products, closed or otherwise. Open source is littered with the bodies of crappy products. Being open source, shouldn't they have garnered "mind share"?
"Open sourcing a platform like Websphere or a collabarative suite like Lotus Notes will not be a commercial disaster, like the bloke who modded my original post 'Troll' seems to b
Re:Good first step... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
There are also a number of key support pieces for the
Re: (Score:3)
Oracle going open source? Colour me shocked, then! DB2, MS-SQL and Oracle are the only major closed source database blokes out there... and Oracle is the biggest of the bunch.
Some Oracle chap tried to speak about "Free Software" offerings from Or
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends on your perspective.
On one hand, maintaining control over closed code creates a monopoly over the ability to *support* the product in question. While opensourcing the code creates competition in the support market.
So the question people should be asking relates to whe
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with the kudos! Let's hope Big Blue can keep on proving that large corporations don't have to be evil!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're doing it because I'm guessing they're able to think big picture. IBM have been in existence for nearly 120 years now. The only way you get to last that long, especially while staying as big as they still are, is by being able to ride the rapids of consumer demand and desire.
They're still going to want to make money, of course...but they're smart enough to realise that a company doesn't really control either half of the supply and demand equation. The consumer declares their demand, and a company that wants to make money and last a long time supplies that demand, rather than trying to change or control what the consumer's demand is.
It is deeply appropriate that the animal most often associated with IBM is an elephant, I think. As well as being large, an elephant is a long lived and very intelligent animal. Also, although its' huge size means that things that shouldn't might get inadvertently stepped on occasionally, being herbivorous, an elephant is usually a fundamentally benevolent animal, as well.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or maybe just read about the concepts [wikipedia.org] presented in the book.
Re:Good first step... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why, then, do they do it? The number one reason IBM supports open standards, supports open source, has opened its patents, and has contributed so much code to Linux is that IBM believes it can compete more effectively on a more level playing field. Compete against whom? Microsoft, mostly. When there is an entrenched de facto monopoly that fully dominates one area of your business (the dekstop) and is trying to muscle in on your turf (higher end servers, databases, web services, hosted services) and has already muscled in very successfully on your groupware turf, how do you fight back?
You try to level the playing field by commoditizing the thing your opponent sells. Microsoft is a software company; IBM sells a lot of software, but their primary business is hardware and services. If they can commoditize the software that runs on their hardware and on which they provide value-added services, it gives them a competitive advantage against software companies (and against hardware companies that don't use open source, too). The revenue stream of the software company goes down, while the revenue they make on service and on hardware sales increases as a result of reduced software costs.
While Sun also has some altruism (maybe more than IBM, because Sun's roots are in BSD; IBM's roots are firmly in proprietary software), I think it's a pretty good bet that the main reason for open-sourcing Solaris and Java is that they weren't making a lot of money on those things anyway (Solaris used to cost hundreds of dollars a copy, then it became essentially free as in beer) and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of fighting off Java on a lot of fronts, so if they open-source Java and Solaris they get:
-Commoditization pressure on Microsoft
-The same benefits of that pressure that IBM reaps, because like IBM, Sun is a hardware and consulting company that also sells software
-Probably more Java mindshare and marketshare
-Some respect from the FOSS community; what accountants call good will
-Linux might stop eating Solaris' lunch a little bit on the lower end of Sun's market
Why do they hope HP will do this too? Because of HP is the same kind of company Sun and IBM are, although HP is more purely a hardware play than either Sun or IBM. If they follow suit and start opening their patent portolio and maybe even open source HP/UX, that puts even more commoditization pressure on Microsoft. Of course, Sun, IBM, and HP all compete against each other - they're selling into the same markets - but each of them views Microsoft as more of a threat. If they all act to substantially level the playing field by opening up lots of their IP, that will make a significant counterweight to Microsoft's dominant position.
Fast forward five to ten years into the future and envision one possible scenario: the successor to Vista has just been released, or maybe hasn't even made it yet. Some places are still running XP. Linux has continued it's slow push onto the desktop and has pushed even farther into the server market. IBM, Sun, and HP all sell servers with either Linux or Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX. Same price either way; the lot have been open-sourced.
On the desktop side, Dell is still selling Linux machines, and they've been joined by Gateway, Lenovo, maybe even Sony (OK, that last one is crazy talk
Microsoft is still a formidable company, with a huge warchest of cash and a lot of highly successful product lines, but the combined weight of its competitors has not only checked its market share gains, but reversed a number of them.
Linux and Mac c
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, unless you're Stallman or a Stallman disciple who think that all proprietary software is evil by nature and should be
eradicated from the face of the Earth. And even then, there's no good reason to not praise the contributions IBM have made to the F/L/OSS world, despite whatever objections you may have to their proprietary offerings.
When they open source DB2, Lotus Notes, AIX may be I will tak
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)