Compliance Toolkit

Do patents threaten your business?

Bruce Perens CNET News

Published: 02 Feb 2005 10:50 GMT

The latest tactic in the software-patenting battle is the granting of patent rights to open source developers. But are the grants really the equivalent of wolves in sheep's clothing?

That's not the only movement on the patent front. The possible approval of a software-patenting measure in Europe this Wednesday could bring a barrage of lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic, affecting proprietary software as well as the open source community.

Let's take a closer look.

Sun recently made software patents available for use by open source developers. But its patent grant came with strings attached: The 1,600-some patents may only be used under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the General Public License which governs Linux, among other things.

So while claiming to make the patents available to open source developers, Sun can sue folks who work on Linux rather than Solaris. The irony here is that Sun's open source license is derived from the licence used for Mozilla, which you can see here.

But Mozilla's developers have made most of their software available under the GPL (which you can see here), as well as under terms of their own licence. If Sun wants to be a partner in the open source community, then shutting out the Linux developers isn't a good start.

Contrast that with IBM's recent patent grant. Big Blue made available patents for use under any of the more than 50 open source licences that were recognized by the Open Source Initiative as of 11 January.