Intel to Universities: No Patents, Please, Just Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Intel to Universities: No Patents, Please, Just Open Source

innovationexcellence.com

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"So how did they finally fix the patent system, Grandpa?"

"They didn't. Nobody could. Over the years, people just got tired of the bullshit and quit using it."

The problem is they still go after open-source software with patent infringement claims (look at Microsoft).

The catch here is of course that intel is a hardware company.

In 2010 alone intel received 1600+ patents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...

If intel wants to stop the patent madness they could start with removing themselves from that top 10.

Yeah, I'm sure that if they suddenly stop filing patents, they'll have absolutely no trouble continuing to build microprocessors. It's not like their competitors will patent things (taking advantage of our brilliant new First To File system) and then take Intel to court for every penny they have...

"Intel follows in the footsteps of HP and IBM, who also fund open source software collaborations with university researchers"

IBM is consistently #1 on that list too

Companies almost have to own patents these day; for defensive reasons if nothing else.

The problem is patent trolls are immune to this kind of defense.

Hardware patents are not a huge part of the madness. Design, business process and software patents, however, usually are.

As nano-tech advances and replicators become more commonplace, hardware will face the same issues with patents and the seeming absurdity of patenting an 'obvious idea'.

> As nano-tech advances and replicators become more commonplace,

I think we should leave science fiction out of the legal system. It is already overburdened dealing with problems we have and doesn't need to deal with the problems we may someday have.

I have difficulty reading that page, with light grey text on a grey, "hand-drawn", graph-paper background.

Something has gone wrong with your rendering. The text is supposed to be on a white background. #555555 text looks just fine like that.

Edit: It may have been a server error but only to some people? It's unclear from the comments on the site.

The money quote: In search of better margins, Intel hopes to beef up its software practice to combat increasingly thin profit margins from chip sales.

Intel has plenty of large competitors in the software area. Still, they expect to make more money thanks to the existence of free software. Contrast this to those who say there's no way to make money if others can copy you.

The rest of the world to Intel: No Patents, Just Open Source...

How would universities get paid for the research they facilitate if this were the standard practice? My university would have to close or curtail its activities in nearly unimaginable ways without the billions of dollars that the research foundation has generated honestly (via things brought into existence by UW researchers: without their minds, their work/results/products would not exist). Incidentally, my university also sued Intel recently over a patent dispute and won.

I don't have a problem with a university owning a patent unless the work was somehow funded by the Federal Government, in which case it should be disallowed.

The amount of money generated for universities by patents on CS/engineering research is quite small, though. The total for all fields in 2009 (according to an unfortunately paywalled report: http://chronicle.com/article/Table-Licensing-Revenue-and/125...) was $1.8 billion, of which the vast majority went to a handful of schools for blockbuster biotech patents (e.g., NYU has been pulling in $100m+ annually from the Remicade patents). I would be surprised if UW non-bio patents are bringing in more than low-single-digit millions, i.e. not much compared to what they get in corporate donations, not to mention NSF and DARPA grants, and even the state subsidy and tuition.

The former Dean of Georgia Tech's CS dept quotes John Hurt from the NSF as claiming: "Of 3,200 universities, perhaps six have made significant amounts of money from their intellectual property rights." I don't think there have been any blockbuster university (non-bio) tech patents since the Akamai (MIT) / PageRank (Stanford) pair ten years ago.

This is really more of an issue with how universities value the research, I think. Most of the time, there isn't a very clear immediate business benefit, so they're willing to part with the IP for very little money.

Prime case is the Mosaic browser IP and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All the research was done by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for the university, and when it was completed and released, didn't really bother to try to get anything from it. The university basically sold the rights to an offshoot company for a very small fee-I believe it was under $1 million, and didn't see any money from it after that.

Part of that is a deliberate strategy on the part of some universities, based on a guess that they'll get more in donations from corporations, spinoffs, and successful alumni voluntarily, than they would get by being tight-fisted with IP. Plus, it increases the university's prestige to have their stuff involved in more products, and their alumni involved in more successful ventures, so there's a cost to doing anything that would complicate stuff up-front. The goal is to get it on the back-end instead: don't hassle the not-yet-successful startup, but if they IPO, nag to see if they're willing to kick in a $50m building or write you into their will.

I'm not sure which version of the calculus is right, but it's at least plausible to me that universities stand to lose more in donations/prestige than they'd gain in royalties if they took stricter approaches to patent licensing.

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