Dear customers and partners,
four years ago yesterday, October 9, 2013, the first development steps of our software “IP Navigator” were made. After the alpha and beta phases we were able to gain further development speed in July 2014 together with our pilot customer group around the VDPM [1]. At the time, the project was timely under pressure because the research system originally developed by Hewlett Packard and operated by the DPMA was shut down at the end of 2014.
It was an exciting time: We would like to thank all our customers and partners for their energetic support and unique cooperation over the last years and we look forward to further joint ventures in the future. Only through close and trustful cooperation between customers, product developers, interface- and database partners and other stakeholders, software systems can be successful today and maintained in the long term.
Just in time for the four-year anniversary, the research software is now freely available under an open source license [2], which is a major milestone in terms of ensuring continuity for the system. We have spared no effort to modernize and restructure the code base for publishing, making it easier for anyone interested to run their own instances of the software and more specifically to look behind the scenes. Vendor lock-in effects [3] are also a thing of the past. In the course of the next months, we will be successively opening the development process itself to make it even more transparent.
We are striving for all researchers to enjoy using the research system. We are looking forward to further questions and suggestions as usual.
Yours sincerely,
Your IP Navigator Support.
[1] http://www.patentberichterstatter-muenchen.de/
[2] http://github.com/ip-tools/ip-navigator
[3] Vendor lock-in - Wikipedia