In order to conjure up more open-source patents, Intel convinces a handful of universities to host Intel Science and Technology Centers at $2.5 million a year for 5 years.  The research will be spearheaded by two investigators, one from each side, and will be supervised by three Intel researchers. Four universities have already agreed to this project this year.

“The IP policies and practices within the ISTCs will typically be designed to level the playing field for all of the participants, thereby enhancing cooperation and open collaboration. The preferred IP policy is to conduct open research wherein ISTC researchers, whether from academia or Intel, agree to not file patents and to publish all patentable inventions. All significant software developed in the course of conducting research will be released under an open source license.”

And Intel wasn’t even the pioneer for this kind of negotiation in patent rights.  HP and IBM also financed open source software collaboration with university researchers.  There will be more to come before the year ends.  Here are the partner-universities so far: Stanford, January, 2011, Visual computing; UC Berkeley, June 2011, Secure computing; Carnegie Mellon, August 2011, Cloud computing; Carnegie Mellon, August 2011, Embedded computing.

According to Matt Hancock, Director of Intel’s Science and Technology Center program office, “Whatever technologies are produced in the ISTCs will be made public, meaning anybody else can continue to build off of it, including Intel.” He also cited three more major goals of ISTCs and that is to: increase the flow of ideas between the academic community and Intel; build a robust hiring pipeline at top-notch universities; change the way that the global research community thinks about cloud computing. ISTCs will also help steer the direction of Intel’s product strategies and strengthen its software practice to battle scrawny chip sales.  The company also looks forward to long-term goals.

“We hope that the research will indirectly benefit Intel’s product development efforts and perhaps Intel Capital, but that’s not the short term goal. We’re aiming at a long pipeline, 7 – 10 years out.”

However, not all patents set off by collaboration between university and industry go open source, despite all the benefits.  According to NCURA, a professional organization of university research administrators, only 3 percent of industry sponsored research projects engender patents.  And not all companies are willing to freely share the results of their sponsored research.  Companies, especially those who deal with pharmaceutical patents, choose exclusive license patents for temporary monopolization because of the amount of time and cash spent just to get a drug approved by the FDA.

Despite becoming a breeding ground for open source licensing, universities still continue to focus on patents. Not everybody is very open to the idea of open source, while some advocate both commercial and open source value.

Besides sponsored university research, Intel is leveraging open source platforms in a few different arenas.  The Intel Development Forum is going on this week, and it was confirmed during the event that the company is developing a console for managing security and power management for OpenStack. In an interview with Billy Cox, he said OpenStack is still a few launches away from competing against VMware.

Intel also rides in the wave of the Android platform’s success, having agreed to a partnership integrating Android software in Intel’s Atom mobile x86-compatible processors, directly competing with ARM.  The news was announced by Google Senior VP Andy Rubin himself.