Hi there! Fellow IBMer :) sorry to hear about your experience so far, just wanted to chime in and say that you're definitely not alone with this perspective. Patents at IBM are so highly valued that they often act as a blinder towards open source.
However, there are definitely groups inside of IBM that choose to open source their work instead of filing for patents. For example, the team that I'm currently on works on the Carbon Design System [0], which is entirely open source. All the work our team does is out in the open too [1][2], which is great!
I would say that for teams like this, the tendency is to open source software and patent processes that are unique to IBM or a particular domain. That way we can try and contribute back as much useful technology as we can!
Obviously there are others at the company who might have a different perspective, but thankfully we're also trying to spread our own take on alternatives to the traditional processes at IBM.
Hope this info can help make your time at IBM a little bit better!
There's a ton of great info packed into this article. It's definitely been a struggle over the years to find a balance between when to prioritize CLI over UI development for Cloud services, but I think they arrived at a sweet spot when it comes to building complementary experiences that help one out where it is most appropriate.
I used to work on a product UI that provided the equivalent CLI command for every action you perform in the UI. Use the UI to learn the CLI - complementary experience.
To add on to this list, even IBM with their large patent portfolio has a large number of teams deploying projects using React and other FB OSS technology.
Yes and for a while it wasn't allowed at IBM either for the same reasons. The latest changes made it possible again which is why now they can/do use it.
This is absolutely correct. Before the end of last year, getting approval to use it was a very challenging process.
However, many teams went through the process in order to use it because of how valuable they believe React is to their products. Groups like IBM Watson IoT were fortunate enough to get portfolio-level clearances as well during that time.
Thankfully the process changed and many product teams add React to their list of libraries/frameworks to evaluate for their use-cases.
To be concrete, IBM Watson has several products that leverage it that we sell to customers. For example, Watson Company Profiler, Watson Virtual Agent, Watson Discovery-related tools, and more.
Other organizations use it as well inside of IBM, like IBM Cloud and IBM Watson IoT, but I'm less familiar with their products off the top of my head.
Disclosure: I work for IBM on a team impacted by these changes.
As far as I know multiple business units within IBM, including Cloud, Watson, and Watson IoT have gone through relocation requests for Design and Engineering roles.
Totally agree, makes the subject extremely approachable versus a lot of technical alternatives that may be deterring to either newcomers, or just people from different backgrounds.
I work in the IBM Design Studio and all the employees have MacBook Pros. It's been working out pretty well actually, even with respect to integrating with some of IBM's legacy software that we have to deal with.
Trying to get a learning project off the ground that revolves around providing Dev Ops for Front End Developers. Goal is to create a solution for product teams that integrates Front End Dev Ops services into a product with minimal infrastructure integration. Overview: https://gist.github.com/joshblack/64e7c31aa47e19cfb3e5 , if anyone is interested in helping out feel free to reply or leave a comment on the gist.
However, there are definitely groups inside of IBM that choose to open source their work instead of filing for patents. For example, the team that I'm currently on works on the Carbon Design System [0], which is entirely open source. All the work our team does is out in the open too [1][2], which is great!
I would say that for teams like this, the tendency is to open source software and patent processes that are unique to IBM or a particular domain. That way we can try and contribute back as much useful technology as we can!
Obviously there are others at the company who might have a different perspective, but thankfully we're also trying to spread our own take on alternatives to the traditional processes at IBM.
Hope this info can help make your time at IBM a little bit better!
[0]: https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/ [1]: https://github.com/carbon-design-system [2]: https://github.com/IBM?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=carbon&type=&languag...