Red Hat is to make the drive for industry patent reform a
key part 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. The
company 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 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 apply a higher standard of scrutiny
to patent applications to ensure better patent quality and to
expand the rights of third parties to challenge questionable
applications and issued patents.
Red Hat is also to create a Software Patent Commons to help promote
the development of innovative software by sharing information and
views among developers and software technologists.
"Patents are not equal to innovation," said Webbink. "More often,
innovation occurs despite patents. Today in the software industry
patents are used to maintain market share, even where that share
has been obtained by anti-competitive means."