IBM frees 500 patents [LWN.net]

IBM frees 500 patents

Posted Jan 12, 2005 1:00 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
Parent article: IBM frees 500 patents

Nearly all the comments here are very pro-IBM. I don't think things are quite that rosy. IBM's move is indeed helpful in the swpat-crazed world of the US, where it provides a small set of patents that Free Software (well OSS in fact) is now able to use. But don't forget this is only 500 of their 50,000 patents, some 30,000 of which are probably software patents.

And at the same time, as a major suporter of ECITA, IBM is spending a lot of effort trying to get software patents imposed on Europe too.

Simply not having swpats would be orders of magnitude better for everyone (except incumbent behemoths like IBM, microsoft and nokia), then we wouldn't be dependent on the charity of IBM to write our own software.

Until IBM stops campaigning for all-encompassing swpats in Europe then we shouldn't be telling them what a good job they are doing letting us use 1%-2% of their patent portfolio.

This could indeed be the start of a major improvement in the climate in the US, but it is really a band-aid over the fundamental problem of awarding patents for all sorts of stupid things which should never have been made patentable in the first place. It shouldn't be possible to be sued for patent infringement for writing your own software in the same way that it is not possible for having orderly thoughts or writing books.

The clause which says they reserve the right to withdraw the patent grant for entities which sue any OSS entity is interesting. On the face of it it's a fine provision, but the question is, will they actually start suing, say nokia, if someone writes a GPLed re-implementation of one of their protocols? They don't want to scare big companies off using Linux, and many of them will already have cross-licensing agreements with IBM which mean they won't be dependent on this grant anyway.

It will certainly be interetsing to see how this plays out, but don't lose sight of the fact that, at least within Europe, IBM is still firmly on the side of the bad guys.

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