CA Releases Patents to OSS

simonfairfax writes "ComputerWorld reports that Computer Associates International has released 14 patents to the opensource community, following IBM's lead. From the article: 'CA said it is joining IBM in encouraging other companies to create an industrywide "patent commons" in which patents are pledged royalty-free to further innovation in areas of broad interest to developers and users of IT.'"

Comments

General Patent License

[tyler_larson]

Actually, I see a real opportunity here. CA has granted you irrevocable license to use their patented software technology if (and only if) you release your implementation under an open source license.

It would be very cool to see another clause saying that organization wishing to take advantage of this patent protection must also license all of their software patents under the same (or compatible) terms.

Rather than taking RMS's short-sighted "no patents at all" approach, the GPL could use patent protection the same way it uses copyright protection to incentivise developers to open-source their software (and patents).

Such an apporach would give open-source software a huge advantage over its proprietary counterpart: not ony would OSS developers get access to a vast selection of source code, but they would have royalty-free access to use certain techniques that would otherwise not be allowed. This could have a very strong viral effect beyond the power that the GPL currently wields.

If RMS could have fought against copyright protection, he would have--after all, "information wants to be free," right? Lacking that option, he used his own copyright protection to force others to willingly give up their own. Software patents are a reality. Rather than fight impotently against the ideal, we ought to harness that protection to further the open-source cause. The earlier it takes hold, the more powerful the move will become.

I rather like the idea of the FSF patenting its more clever ideas to prevent them from being used by closed-source developers. Right now OSS makes it easier to develop open source, the effect would be better if they also made it harder to survive developing closed source software.