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Big Blue's patent surprise

An interesting announcement just came out of IBM today. Namely, Big Blue is publicly pledging that 500 of its patents will be made available for use in open source software projects.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer
An interesting announcement just came out of IBM today. Namely, Big Blue is publicly pledging that 500 of its patents will be made available for use in open source software projects. Since many Web services and SOA projects are built on IBM's J2EE-based Websphere -- and open-source platforms such as Apache and JBoss -- this may help clear some of the air around SOA projects as well.
Patents covered by IBM's pledge include interfacing, storage management, multi-processing, database and data handling, human interfacing, image processing, security, software development, e-commerce, and network management.
The industry has been awkward, ham-handed, and inconsistent with handling patents. You may have seen David Berlind's post last week on Microsoft's patent moves. Last month, the industry let 39 Web services patents slip through its fingers in the Commerce One sell-off.
Let's hope IBM's example will inspire others to keep the lawyers out of the software development process.

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