{"id":518575,"date":"2010-04-06T21:36:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T01:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100406\/1628178904.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-06T21:36:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-07T01:36:56","slug":"ibm-breaks-promise-threatens-open-source-company-over-patents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/518575","title":{"rendered":"IBM Breaks Promise; Threatens Open Source Company Over Patents"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a while now, IBM has been positioning itself as being in favor of really fixing our broken patent system (even as it’s remained at the top of the food chain in terms of companies filing for patents). However, we’ve always been a bit skeptical<\/a> of IBM’s claims about this — as they quite often seemed to be more of a PR positioning move, rather than any real commitment to fixing the patent system. Almost exactly five years ago, the company made a big stink about freeing up approximately 500 patents<\/a> for use in open source offerings. At the time, even that seemed like more of a PR stunt than anything else, but still, you’d at least think they’d live up to their word.<\/p>\n

Not so apparently.<\/p>\n

Slashdot<\/a> points us to the news that IBM has threatened an open source project with some patents<\/a> — including two that were in that list of 500 (along with over 100 others). In the past, when IBM’s nastier patent activities have gained attention in the tech-blog world, it’s been known to back down<\/a>, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see that happen again here. But the fact that it made this threat in the first place, yet again, calls into question IBM’s real commitment towards moving away from supporting patents as a bullying tool.<\/p>\n

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For a while now, IBM has been positioning itself as being in favor of really fixing our broken patent system (even as it’s remained at the top of the food chain in terms of companies filing for patents). However, we’ve always been a bit skeptical of IBM’s claims about this — as they quite often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}