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Computer Associates may raise its patent shields

As I write this blog, Computer Associates CEO John Swainson is giving the afternoon keynote speech at LinuxWorld in Boston. According to a source who was present at a Computer Associates' breakfast this morning, CA is almost definitely going to follow suit with IBM in not only making its patents available for royalty-free deployment in open source software, but also in using its patents to defend the open source community from law suits.
Written by David Berlind, Inactive

As I write this blog, Computer Associates CEO John Swainson is giving the afternoon keynote speech at LinuxWorld in Boston. According to a source who was present at a Computer Associates' breakfast this morning, CA is almost definitely going to follow suit with IBM in not only making its patents available for royalty-free deployment in open source software, but also in using its patents to defend the open source community from law suits. Nothing has been announced, nor have any specific patents been identified. But, given the emphasis on what IBM did in releasing 500 patents to any software being developed under an Open Source Initiative-approved license (versus what Sun did with 1600 patents for developers under the OSI-approved Sun-authored CDDL open source license), it appears as though CA is poised to go the "any OSI-approved license" route. If CA takes the IBM route, the pressure on Sun to reconsider its CDDL-only position could intensify.

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