Microsoft: oops, here's three more Web services patents

Earlier this week, we (and many other sites across the industry) reported on Microsoft's announcement that it was freeing up patents related to 35 Web services, mainly an assortment of key WS-* specs, along with the widely used SOAP and WSDL standards. 

Now, make that 38.

A reliable inside source at Microsoft, Jorgen Thelin, has confirmed that the vendor missed a couple of Web services, and has updated its covenant to extend to 38 services.  These consist of three specifications that are part of WS-Security:

• WS-Security: SAML Token Profile
• WS-Security: Kerberos Token Profile
• WS-Security: Rights Expression Language (REL) Token Profile.
  

Some questioned the status of some additional specifications Microsoft had a hand in, including Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS).

Thelin checked into BPEL and WS-PolicyAssertions. With BPEL4WS, "We are still evaluating opportunities to extend the covered specifications in this and other areas," Thelin said. WS-PolicyAssertions may be eventually obsolete anyway, he writes, because "that spec was deprecated/superseded back in 2004 and replaced with domain specific policy specs like WS-RMPolicy and WS-SecurityPolicy." (Which are on the list, of course.)