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innovators-patent-agreement
OPEN SOURCE2012–2023
twitter / innovators-patent-agreement

innovators-patent-agreement

Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA)

8Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
929GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA)

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-04-17 17:42:50 UTC to 2023-01-08 05:01:13 UTC.

012342012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

11 sources
When I was working there I implemented my patent during a hack week (given a set of follows return the list of matching tweet ids, very similar to his prototype): https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120136905A1/en (licensed under Innovators Patent Agreement, https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement) I could have definitely served all the chronological timeline requests on a normal server with lower latency that the 1.1 home timeline API. There are a bunch of numbers in the calculations that he is doing that are off but not by an order of magnitude. The big issue is that since I left back then Twitter has added ML ads, ML timeline and other features that make current Twitter much harder to fit on a machine than 2013 Twitter.
In Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
"Business models for open-source software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... ... - https://github.com/google - https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes (Apache 2.0) - https://github.com/uber - https://github.com/apple (Swift is Apache 2.0) - https://github.com/microsoft - https://github.com/github - https://github.com/twitter - https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement - https://github.com/facebook ... - "GNU Social" (GNU AGPL v3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social ... http://choosealicense.com/appendix/ has a table for comparison of open source software licenses. http://tinyurl.com/p6mka3k describes Open Source Governance in a chart with two axes (Cathedral / Bazaar , Benevolent Dictator / Formal Meritocracy) ... as distinct from https://en.wikiped
Read the rest
ia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance , which is the application of open source software principles to government. USDS Playbook advises "Default to open" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play13 Anarchy / Budgeting: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/budgetdata
In Ask HN: How would one build a business that only develops free software?
I realize that we all have strong opinions about the topic of software patents, but in an effort to radiate more light and less heat, I think it is important to understand the official Twitter position on this topic as well. Introducing the Innovator's Patent Agreement Note: Emphasis is mine. "We will implement the IPA later this year, and it will apply to all patents issued to our engineers, both past and present." [1] "The Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA) is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from a company to its employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. The company will not use the patents in offensive litigation without the permission of the inventors. This control flows with the patents, so if the company sells the patents to others,
Read the rest
the assignee can only use the patents as the inventor intended." [2] [1] http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/04/introducing-innovator... [2] https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement
In Twitter granted patent on Twitter-like services
Do you think that twitter's innovators patent agreement fails at addressing your concerns about defensive patents? > The Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA) is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from a company to its employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. The company will not use the patents in offensive litigation without the permission of the inventors. This control flows with the patents, so if the company sells the patents to others, the assignee can only use the patents as the inventor intended. And the agreement text: https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement/blob/...
In Bankrupt Kodak sells off patents to investors for $525M

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