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Patents

Patents and open source are often presented as opposites, but in practice they are complementary tools for managing innovation. Open source encourages collaboration and adoption, while patents can reduce legal uncertainty around the innovations that a project depends on.

Why Patents Matter In Open Source​

Patents can help an open source project in several ways:

  • Defensive protection: a patent portfolio, non-assert commitment, or participation in a patent pool can discourage opportunistic litigation.
  • Clarity for users and contributors: licenses such as Apache 2.0 include patent grants so downstream users can adopt the software with greater confidence.
  • Support for governance: clear patent rules help maintainers decide what can be contributed, what should be reviewed by legal teams, and when extra approvals are needed.

This matters especially when organisations contribute code that may include patentable ideas or when they depend on business-critical open source components.

Why This Is Important In Finance​

Financial services firms rely heavily on shared infrastructure, data platforms, security tooling, cloud-native components, and increasingly open source fintech projects. In that setting, a patent dispute can become more than a legal inconvenience:

  • it can interrupt delivery of important internal platforms;
  • it can increase supplier and operational risk;
  • it can affect investment decisions for fintech products built on open source components.

For that reason, banks and fintech firms often want open source usage and contribution processes to include intellectual property review, especially before publishing novel security, trading, payments, or blockchain-related technology.

Practical Examples​

  • Patent grants in licenses: contributor patent grants reduce the risk that a contributor later asserts patent claims over the code they contributed.
  • Defensive patent pools: arrangements such as the Open Invention Network help protect important open source ecosystems used widely across the industry.
  • Fintech collaboration: shared platforms for payments, blockchain, or market infrastructure can combine open development with patent pledges or cross-licensing arrangements to support adoption without unnecessary litigation risk.

What To Put In Place​

Organisations working with open source should consider:

  1. a review process for potentially patentable contributions before publication;
  2. guidance on which open source licenses are acceptable, including their patent clauses;
  3. clear contributor terms such as CLAs and DCOs;
  4. transparent governance for how patent issues are identified and escalated.

Further Reading​