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Computer Associates Pledges to Open Source Patents
DigitumDei writes "Systems management vendor Computer Associates International has confirmed that it intends to pledge a number of its patents to the open source community. This is a move by CA to make it clear that they do not intend to use their patents against Linux. They have, however, ruled out any further large scale donation of CA software code to the open source community as they just released the Ingres database management system under an open source license last year."
I would be surprised if they put it in the public domain, because then competitors could use it for closed source projects. It depends on what they are releasing. They probably aren't going to release anything that would give another company an edge over them. I doubt they're that dumb. It'll more likely be some non-importnat pieces of code for users to poke around with.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
But I then come along demanding royalties because I own the patents to bucks
How do we know all these donated patents are actually valid and unique? Has anyone checked before using them?
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Wait a sec, IBM sits in both camps. They believe in expensive lucrative technology as well as a future in services.
the GPL patent can only used with other GPL patented product. In this case, commercial product with patent in would not be able to use it :)
:)
I guess you mean "closed" software, since a software being licensed under GPL has nothing to do with it being commercial or not.
Thus said, the goal of a patent is first and foremost to make money to justify innovation (that shouldn't apply to softwares but it does at least in the US and in Japan). Therefore, I think CA and IBM have done quite good with their patent opening to the free software community. They can still get money from licensing their patent and suing proprietary software companies for infringing their patent, and still the OSI approved licensed projects are safe from attack.
Nevertheless, they're only opening *SOME* of their patents, and I really think they should make bigs efforts to be clear on WHICH patents they are opening.
Anyway, that's a small consolation for having software patents. Go European Parliament
Don't fall for this. These people, like IBM and Sun, etc. Are only doing this to appear friendly towards F/OSS and its real purpose is to reduce the groundswell of the anti IP movement which rising fast amid all the abuse that's finally coming to light. Their actions may appear commendable, but their motives are anything but. Just wait for the other shoe to drop.
What?
Part of me would like to think that CA did this for purely good reasons, but I suspect there is a practical reason behind this.
Many companies donate patents (intellectual property) to non-profit institutions for tax cut purposes. A company can "claim" a value of $x for the patents that it knows it will never use or find a license for, and give them to a university or non-profit as a charitable donation, in effect lowering their tax bill which improves their earnings per share. This is done in the chemical industry all the time.
So we should look at the patents being donated - are they really key patents, or extra patents that cover some niche or really should have never been issued in the first place? I'm betting that none of these patents really prevent the open source community from doing anything currently, and their release is probably a tax-cut plan for CA.
I'd love to be wrong though.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
to really fork. One group will use all this patented stuff, and be vulnerable to legal attacks. The other group will(should) play it safe and stay completely patent free.
What?
You know I was thinking about this today before I even read this story. I was wondering why the EFF doesn't just register all the possible patents that come from any open source program. I bet if they did that and then turned around made the patents "open source" (free to use) but restricted the use to anyone not one a special EFF blacklist. That way the EFF gains alot of leverage and I bet they would slowly built up enough patents on important software advances to really hurt the big companies trying to screw us over with patents. I say use thier own laws against them.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
I guess I need a lawyer to explain exactly what software patents mean to me. Have the corporate lobbyists made it illegal for me to express myself in my own home by writing a program that may do similar things in similar ways as programs written by the monopolistic corporations that they represent?
If it's not illegal for me to express my creative talents in my own home is it now illegal for me to share those expressions with others?
If it is illegal for me to express my creative talents even in my own home then surly most government agencies and private businesses that do their own in-house programming are also endanger of going afoul of the software patent laws unless they hire an army of attorneys to research each and every line of code that they write to ensure that someone else doesn't have a patent covering its functionality. I know of no government agency or private business that does this.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!