Week 8, Post 2 — Google's promise: A PR stunt?

Google has promised not to assert select patents against open source software. Its announcement comes a few years after certain companies made the same promise. In 2005, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Computer Associates, etc. promised not to assert select patents against open source software. They all got some publicity for their announcements, but it was obvious for everyone to see that those pledges had not changed anything.

Now, 8 years later, Google has gone the same way those companies did. It pledged a total of ten patents. By comparison, IBM had pledged 500, and Sun approximately 1600.

Google's pledge is the least generous out of the lot. IBM made available about 1% of the company's patents at the time, and Sun's pledges involved more than 1%. Google owns over 17,000 patents, and has pledged only a small fraction of a percent of their portfolio to open source.

This decision has left quite a few confused. Why should a concept that failed with far larger numbers of patents eight years ago suddenly be the answer, with a far smaller number of patents involved this time around? What do you think?