Irving Wladawsky-Berger talks about supporting innovation in open communities. In particular, some of the issues of intellectual property:

IP management is fairly well understood if you are a business, but how do you manage IP with a dispersed community of individuals like those supporting Linux and other open source projects, which generally have no entity charged with managing IP and collecting patents? We are all learning in this area. One approach is for individual businesses to pledge patents in support of open communities. We in IBM did this with our patent pledge earlier this year, which granted access to over 500 software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software like Linux. More recently we pledged access to our patent portfolio for the development of selected open healthcare and education software standards. Other companies like Red Hat, Novell, Nokia and Sun have also made patent pledges in various forms in support of open communities.

Still another way to support these open communities is to work not just company by company, but collectively. An example of this approach is the Patent Commons Project established by OSDL to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges from a variety of sources are housed for the benefit of open source communities.