Leasing Google’s patents

Google is a very unique organization when it comes to their business, consumers and developers. The core of Google is the Google Search engine and the advertising model. This brings in a lot of money, but in return, Google gives a lot back to the community.

Today, on the Google Code Blog, they announced something, well, unique. They are approaching innovation and industry acceptance from a very, well, unique standpoint. Google is handing out free licenses to any patents they own that you would need to create applications that use Atom, AtomPub. Atoms is a kind of RSS format and AtomPub is a mechanism to publish ATOM schemas.

But why is Google doing this, well, it’s unique again. Google is embracing the developers community. It’s goal is to encourage developers to use Google’s API so other sites will distribute photos, videos, calendars, contacts and the like in the same fashion as Google does. They claim that opening up to developers like this, Google is making it easier for developers to create new mash-ups (integrating content from different sites into new content). It’s making the Web 3.0 happening, it’s making the, so-called, semantic web a reality. It’s so computers are able to understand the content and be able to interpret this content.

Are they really doing it to help developers? Are they truly trying to do good and no evil? Is this a new for of open innovation? I don’t think so! I think Google is preparing for the future and trying to stay on top of the food chain and have all of us create content that is easier to swallow by the Google Search Engine. It’s not open innovation. It is however a small step for mankind and a huge step for Google! Google is truly slowly becoming a scary company...