this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Hello fellow ex-IBMer. I came to the corp from an open source background and I was happy that my LTC coworkers seemed to despise software parents despite the huge pressure from management.
I wonder how much of this is that IBM fell out of the patent lead and decided to just take their ball and go home. Or how much is RedHat influence shifting the mindset away from the patent Mexican standoff with everyone else.
It’s been 25 years for me, so fortunately the patents have all expired (technically it was more than 2 because of publication in a few different countries, but it was for two inventions). However, during the time when they were all still valid I always had to tread a fine line with other employers — one the one hand, of course they’re on my resume (and LinkedIn profile). But on the other, if they knew about the contents of the inventions and someone in our organization ran afoul of them, they at least needed some plausible deniability that they didn’t know about the contents of the inventions. And for at least one of them, I always feared if they knew about it they might be tempted to try to use it, and be driven insane by the knowledge that if they did, IBM could sue them into the ground 🤣.
I did have a pre-existing Open Source project from prior to working at IBM which I ensured was adequately documented prior to my employment. It was eventually forked and became an IBM alphaWorks project — I never got any money for it (they offered, but it was a pathetic amount for losing all rights to my own pre-existing code that took years of effort), and after leaving IBM had to go back to working on the original pre-IBM codebase.
Overall, my experience at IBM as an inventor/innovator wasn’t great, but was better than most other organizations I’ve worked for since. Honestly, I wish we could just remove software patents altogether, making IBM’s move here moot.