IBM will release more patents to open-source developers in the future, Sutor says, adding, "We don't have a fixed timetable." Coming on the heels of the sale of its PC business to China's Lenovo Group Ltd., the move is a further indication that IBM wants to position itself primarily as a service provider, some analysts believe. "If your goal is to be a provider of higher-value services and solutions, then fighting over who owns a file format is not critical," says John Rymer, VP for application development research at Forrester Research. The intellectual property represented by the patents will be available only to those programmers working on projects that meet the Open Source Software Initiative definition of open-source software. Among other things, that definition stipulates that open-source software remain royalty-free.