AOL’s Mike Manos recently noted that an April 23rd Yahoo! filing argues that designs utilized by Facebook and made public as part of the Open Compute Initiative might infringe on Yahoo!’s intellectual property. Perhaps so, but so what? Wouldn’t Yahoo! be better served by taking credit for the donating the designs to the Open Compute Initiative and dropping any threat of litigation?
Yes, Yahoo! has the right to protect its intellectual property, but in doing so, it perpetuates the larger culture of secrecy that has impeded development and adoption of energy-saving data center strategies that would benefit us all. Should Yahoo! prevail in its action and Facebook be punished, the chill on open source activities would be profound. In fact, it would be hard to see any company sharing so widely, after watching Facebook get slapped.