IBM wishes to share its intellectual property

April 6, 2005     Page 1 of 3

IBM strongly believes it's time to learn how to share intellectual property among other IT developers and integrators. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, v. p. of technology and strategy at IBM, said the days are gone when a company could get by on its own proprietary technology. Today, working together as a team is the order of the day, he said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

Ten years ago, a business thought everything they did had to be proprietary and intellectual property (IP) had to be protected against all comers," Wladawsky-Berger said. Now, though, "if you really want to tap into the energy of communities out there, you need to balance your proprietary approach to IP with a much more open, collaborative approach."

IBM itself has taken a mixed approach to the open-source idea. It has aggressively promoted Linux for years and assigned hundreds of programmers to improve it. It also launched the Eclipse programming tool project. At the same time, IBM sells a lot of proprietary software, including its WebSphere business software and DB2 database.

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