Big Blue opens the patent books to boost innovation and discourage litigation.

US IT vendor IBM has announced it is throwing open the books on some of its patents in an effort to boost interoperability between various software standards.

The company has said it will grant “perpetual and universal access” to certain IBM intellectual property that relates to the 150 different standards that are aimed at making software work on different platforms.

IBM is hoping that the move will promote and foster greater innovation, allowing hardware and software to talk more freely to each other. The company has made special emphasis on web services, meaning software and data that is transacted over the internet.

The commitment from IBM is valid to distributors, developers and manufacturers but with the proviso that no adopter of IBM’s software patents is suing anyone else over patented technology required to implement those same standards.

"IBM is sending a message that innovation and industry growth happens in an open, collaborative atmosphere," said Bob Sutor, IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards. "Users will adopt new technologies if they know that they can find those technologies in a variety of interchangeable, compatible products from competing vendors. We think customers will like this added assurance for the open standards upon which they have come to depend."

In the past, IBM required that all adopters held a royalty-free license agreement from the company but it hopes now that other intellectual property owners will follow IBM’s example.

The news from IBM is in distinct contrast to the moves being made by rival Microsoft, which is looking to sure up its intellectual property rights with various Linux operating system distributors through various agreements such as the one signed on June 14 with Linspire.