The cover of today’s NYTimes Business section has a story on IBM’s patent reevlauation and their patent release. As I discussed in my interview with the News and Observer back in mid-January, IBM is getting the “Better if we share” idea. The Times writer rightly cites Eric von Hippel‘s new MIT Press book, Democratizing Innovation (which you may buy or download free from his website as a PDF and yes the book has a Creative Commons license) as a good (I’d say great) source for learning about the ideas influencing the IBM decision.

Aside: The online version of the story has an audio/visual slide show which does little more than summarize the article. The pictures there add little to the story. Looks like a way to give you all of the downside of a radio news short version of the story with not much added insight. The charts however are quite good. Both are accessible as click and pop links on the story site.

Personal Aside: I did a separate interview with the IBM folks in the article back in February as a follow up to the NandO interview. They seemed to be right on top of things as you might expect and were very interested in ibiblio. It was also a good feeling to hear that I had it right in my interview — I was wondering if they were calling to set me straight on a few things at first, but I surprised myself ;->