Open source directions: IBM’s Bob Sutor on best practices

Comments on Microsoft-Novell lovefest, Oracle’s recent open source moves

By Deni Connor, Network World, 11/13/06

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Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM, sat down with Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor to discuss the relationship between intellectual property and open source. The discussion ranged from how a company can balance open source and proprietary software development to what Novell and Microsoft are doing.

Editor's Note: According to his blog site, Sutor is the IBM executive responsible for driving and executing the cross-company business and technical strategy for open standards and open source as they relate to software, hardware, services, vertical industries and emerging markets. In particular, he's helping to move IBM from its traditional technical and intellectual property approach to one where business exploitation of standards and open source for greater customer value is paramount, especially in vertical industries and emerging markets.

You gave the keynote at the Frontiers of Intellectual Property conference at the University of Texas in Austin last week. What was the gist of that talk?

IBM is the world patent leader -- the patents cover everything from software to hardware and everything in between. We have over 40,000 global patents, yet simultaneously we are the leader in open standards and a corporate leader around open source. We've done things like releasing 500 patents to open source last year. The big question today is, how does a company balance these? In the business climate today, how do you make decisions about what you keep and what you let other people use? That's a big change for IBM.

For a long time we looked at licensing -- if you want to use our stuff, then come pay us. That worked for a long time. We make about a billion [dollars] a year from our intellectual property. We realized several years ago that that wasn't going to be enough, that if we wanted to look at growth in the long term in markets we were interested in moving into, we had to loosen up and start building a foundation around open standards for connecting systems over the Internet and driving a service-oriented architecture.

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