Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--479eb1-So IBM wrote an article. It w/en

So IBM wrote an article. It was in Think magazine, I believe, issue number five, 1990 &mdash; that's IBM's own magazine &mdash; an article about IBM's patent portfolio. IBM said that it got two kinds of benefit from its 9000 active US patents. One benefit was collecting royalties from licenses. But the other benefit, the bigger benefit, was access to things patented by others. Permission to not be attacked by others with their patents, through cross-licensing. And the article said that the second benefit was an order of magnitude greater than the first. In other words, the benefit to IBM of being able to make things freely, not being sued, was ten times the benefit of collecting money for all their patents.