Red Hat is to make industry patent reform a key issue of
its open source strategy.
At last week’s Red Hat Summit in the US, Red Hat deputy general
counsel Mark Webbink pushed a three-part intellectual property
strategy to promote product innovation.
The first part of the strategy builds on the work of the
existing Fedora project, the free Linux project sponsored by Red
Hat.
Red Hat is creating the Fedora Foundation, with the intent of
moving Fedora project development work and contributed code to the
Foundation.
Red Hat will still provide financial and engineering support to
Fedora, but by creating the Fedora Foundation it intends to promote
broader community involvement in Fedora-sponsored projects.
The second front of Red Hat’s patent strategy is to continue to
pressure the US government and the European Parliament on patent
reform.
Red Hat wants patent systems to hold patent applications to a
higher standard of scrutiny, to ensure better patent quality and to
expand the rights of third parties to challenge questionable patent
applications and issued patents.
And thirdly, Red Hat is to create a “Software Patent Commons” to
help promote the development of innovative software by sharing
information and views among developers and leading software
technologists.
“Patents are not equal to innovation,” said Webbink. “More
often, innovation occurs despite patents. What we observe today in
the software industry is the use of patents to maintain market
share, even where that market share has been obtained by
anti-competitive means.”
He said, “We need to move away from a system of software patents
compromised by trivial, incremental enhancements that block
innovation, to a system that is aimed at rewarding substantial
innovation.”
Much of Red Hat’s product technology is already offered to the
open source community to enable further development.