GE Offering Thousands Of Its Patents In Exchange For Innovation
General Electric, the inventor of inventing, is reinventing inventing.
The company is teaming up with a crowdsourced social platform Quirky to release thousands of its patents to the public, starting next month with a few hundred searchable patents.
“People will be able to use GE’s technology in the creation of their own consumer product ideas,” the companies explained.
The move by GE follows in the footsteps of companies like Google, who recently contributed 10 patents to allow developers use. The Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge not only offers open source software, but also cuts down on the chances of lawsuits.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) wants to keep the technology behind Obama’s impressive web presence a secret.
Obama’s website is a beautiful fundraising machine that is being credited for much of his success during the last election. The social media laden site has given him a reputation of being America’s first truly social president.
For both ethical and developmental reasons the team of tech superstars that built and managed the site are calling for the programming, which was developed off of pre-existing open source software, to be made public.
Should other people be able to build off of the technology that helped Obama get elected or should it be kept under wraps?
[Image by Wikimedia user TonyTheTiger][Posted by M. Cecelia Bittner]
This is why yesterday the company published the blueprints and specs of a new super-efficient system it’s developed—out in the open, for all to use as they please. It’s part of what Facebook is calling the Open Compute Project, which is taking a page from the open-source movement in software. Will Facebook’s Open Compute Project Accelerate Data Center Innovation?