One by one the giants of patent fees and proprietary platforms have succumbed to the open source wave. Microsoft launched its shared source initiative in 2003, only two years after CEO Steve Ballmer labelled it ‘un-American’ and a ‘cancer’. IBM invested $1bn in Linux back in 2000 (and committed a further $1bn) this year, and has contributed many projects such as the Eclipse framework. Even the doyen of patent ownership, Qualcomm, included open source in its model when it set up a separate unit, the Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) in 2009. These companies are not just responding to the challenge from the Linux/web firms which grew up with open source. They have recognized that, provided the ‘open’ projects are firmly…