IBM's patent donations (was Re: [TriLUG] So did they get your quote right Jason?)

[Steve Litt]

On Friday 14 January 2005 12:00 am, Mike Johnson wrote:
> If you look at
> IBM's portfolio of patents (I believe they hold more patents than any
> other company), five hundred is a drop in the bucket.  IBM mentions that
> they indend to reserve the right to enforce patents when other companies
> want to sell software related to IBM's patents.  This isn't what Open
> Source is all about.  If you look at the BSD license (my favorite), code
> under that license may be bundled up and sold, as long as credit is
> given.  This will directly conflict with IBM's 'opening' of their
> patents, as it still restricts the use of software that uses one of
> IBM's patents.

Mike, I had this exact same thought. With anything other than a copyleft 
license, use of IBM's patents restricts the right under licenses like BSD to 
take something private. IMHO such patent inclusion is incompatible with BSD 
or other permissive free software.

I don't recall actually reading that they'd enforce it if you sold it, but if 
so, that conflicts with GPL.

I'm concerned that people start to include these in their software, and then, 
these patents act as a "poison pill" preventing sales or lawful relicensing 
of software.

I personally would not use these patents in my free software projects, and 
would hope I'd never need to interoperate with systems using these patents.

By the way, I'm old enough to remember when IBM was the monopolist, and we 
little programmers rejoiced that Bill and Paul created MS DOS so us little 
guys had an affordable programming platform. Guess I never completely lost my 
fear of IBM. They're on my side now, but I'm always a little leary.

STeveT

Steve Litt
Founder and acting president: GoLUG
http://www.golug.org