The company seems to be even more determined to support the open source community, and it has announced yesterday that it will donate $5 million in a 2 year program in which the students will get e-business diplomas. With these, they will be able to apply for jobs, such as: web developers, software developers, consultants in e-business problems or business application developers.

All the students who will take these open source software lectures will have a wide range of job options after finishing their studies. IBM has showed its interest to hire a large number of those who are well trained in the open-source arts. This program will take place in several colleges from the United States: Cowley County Community College, Hutchinson Community College and Wichita Area Technical College.

At the beginning of this year, the computer giant said that 500 of its software patents will be made public and given to the open source community. In this way, developers will be able to use those technologies without paying any copyright fees.

IBM describes this decision as being part of the "new era", in which the company changes its conception on intellectual property.