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IP Insurance For Software
isn't my name writes "We all know that OSRM has come out to offer insurance against intellectual property claims for open source software. Recently, we've seen IBM open up 500 patents and SUN up the ante with 1600. But all of these moves are targeted at F/OSS software. There's an article at IPW that looks at the state of patent insurance for non-F/OSS."
Sun released the patents only under their Creative OSI-approved license. The rest of the open source software, including GNU-based or MPL-based, is still in the air.
This creates the precedent to have open source GNU-based programs that violate the patents and Creative-based programs that are perfectly legal.
It certainly seems like a smart thing to do from Sun's point of view (trying to attract open source developers to their license scheme by giving access to software patents).
They don't really care about open source.
If you listen to their PR people they claim that "the whole Linux thing" "wouldn't have happened" if they'd open soured Solaris ten years ago; they try to pretend that the Solaris open source thing is just something they should have done a long time ago, and Solaris will soon get all the benefits of open source community Linux has. As if open source is some kind of magical pixie dust that you sprinkle on software and bam! It's successful!
In reality what is happening is that the GNU operating environment and the Linux operating system beat Sun in the marketplace fair and square-- not because of some "open source" magical pixie dust, but because it's a better product-- and Sun knows this.
The reason Microsoft can never beat Linux is because they believe they're competing with RedHat when in truth they are competing with the GPL. You can't compete with the body of GPLed software the way you compete with a company; it isn't a single organization, it's millions of autonomous people working in concert. Knock out Redhat, something indistinguishable will rise up to take its place.
Sun has finally figured out how to compete with this. Instead of targeting a company, they've declared war on the GPL itself. For awhile they did quite a lot of laying groundwork by running around telling people that GPL is full of IP flaws and in the future you'll need patents to operate in the software industry. Now they're trying to push out a huge body of work under an open source license which has no particular distinguishing features except that it's incompatible with the GPL, and offered as candy all these patents to "open source projects" while conspicuously not offering any sort of protection to the GPL. Sun recognizes that the threat to them at this point isn't Linux the software program, it's the community; and that as long as the community remains solid, directed and internally compatible, they can't defeat it. So they're trying to splinter the community. And this may work.