Open Source is the key to innovation.

Innovation requires a lot of effort and while most companies rely on a limited amount of experts to develop the things they need, others open source whatever they develop and get a crowd of experts testing, using, debugging and contributing to their software in a scale that no company can afford to maintain.

That’s why Linux is the most advanced operating system in most of the areas that really matters. It is flexible, easy to extend and adapt to whatever environment you want: I’ve even seen a linux distro booting from a 1.44MB floppy disk! Today we have it running on a wide range of environments and machines that goes from mobile phones (guess what’s behind Android?) to large clusters and servers. Though I enjoy to work on my Mac, we all have to admit that Linux is the overall winner.

Now that people figured that Open Source is the key to innovation, we’re beginning to see companies and groups of people open sourcing their hardwares, like Facebook and Open Source Ecology.

Facebook just open sourced the technology they developed to build their datacenter, which involves all necessary info to build the server chassis, motherboard, power supplies, etc.

Open Source Ecology is a community trying to come up with the specs for easily building from scratch “50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts“. They even have an open source proposal for vehicles!

4 Years of Factor e Farm in 4 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

With a world evolving so fast, I can’t imagine another model to cope with our ever growing needs and challenges. Now, let’s take part of this crowd, jump in an give a hand!

This week I read an article from Erik J. Heels, where he states that patents are not always worth a try for startups, mainly when it comes to software patents.

Well, it happens that I have being reading about this subject lately, and sometimes I do agree, sometimes I don’t.

Although being expensive and time consuming, patents do give its owner a reasonable advantage over competitors avoiding them from stealing the idea. Ok, I agree that it doesn’t always avoid that. Sometimes, enforcing a software patent isn’t that easy, and if they steal your idea early, then they may gain a huge advantage over you before you even get you patent aproved.

It takes something between 5 to 6 years to get a software patent aproved. That’s just about the life time of most technologies!

If your technology is good enough to strive through and live longer than that, you probably managed to gain the biggest piece in the market share. Then, would you really need a software patent to enforce competitors?

It happens that there is no easy answer to this. It is very hard to predict the future, and patents are assets. If you’re more conservative, then patents will certainly bring you some peace of mind. If you’re the type that doesn’t fear competitors and trust in your bat, then patents may be a waste of time and money.

But never forget: patents are assets. Though you may never use it, whenever you need it you’ll have it.

And no, I’m not going to start working as an IP lawyer or consultant, in case you’re wondering I’m being biased. It simply happens that I have a special interest on this matter.

What do you think? Is it worth investing on patents, or is it better to use that money and time trying to overcome competition?