At the Microsoft policy blog (Microsoft On The Issues) Horacio Gutierrez makes a good point about the economic value of intellectual property. Collaboration on interoperability holds a great deal of promise, especially for companies running both "open source and proprietary software". For this collaboration to be most effective, it must involve both sharing of, and competition between, the intellectual assets of many companies.
All information technology solutions - regardless of software development or business models - benefit from a balance between collaboration and competition. [...] At the heart of these business arrangements is an honest recognition of the value of the intellectual assets that drive innovation. Such arrangements strike a balance between intellectual property incentives that encourage, recognize, and reward innovation, and practical mechanisms for sharing intellectual property that are responsible, accessible, and affordable.Expropriating intellectual assets may benefit somebody, but collaboration that respects intellectual property benefits everybody involved. Our economic future depends on it.
At Microsoft, we have created many such business arrangements - more than 500 in just five years - through the licensing of our intellectual property to a wide range of companies from a variety of industries and geographies. In fact, two new deals were announced last week. One is a patent licensing agreement with Brother, a leading printer company, which includes IP coverage for devices running on Linux-based technologies. The other is the licensing of Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync intellectual property to Google that will help G-mail customers better manage their data.
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