Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Patent Commons

IBM has announce that it will pledge 500 patents for those working in open source. The official announcement is here. Do you think that other companies will join in this activity? If so, why?

posted by Paul Arne @ 8:22 AM  

1 Comments:

At 9:44 AM, gumout said...

They probably will. If open source licensing as defined by
OSI is not possible due to preemption difficulties then the
patent overture is simply empty rhetoric by IBM.

The proprietary world has little to risk if the patent
waiver is dependant upon the validity of the OSI license
definition.

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf

"The pledge will benefit any Open Source Software. Open
Source Software is any computer software program whose
source code is published and available for inspection and
use by anyone, and is made available under a license
agreement that permits recipients to copy, modify and
distribute the program's source code without payment of fees
or royalties. All licenses certified by opensource.org and
listed on their website as of 01/11/2005 are Open Source
Software licenses for the purpose of this pledge.."

 

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