[Sussex] Breaking Patent News

[Mark Harrison]

It's even better.... Read the following paragraph:

" In order to avoid the possibility that a party will take advantage of
   this pledge and then assert patents of its own against FOSS, this
   pledge is irrevocable except that IBM reserves the right to terminate
   this patent pledge and commitmentonly with regard to any party who
   files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights
   against Open Source Software."

ie - if you start trying to enforce your patents against the FOSS community,
you can't use our patented stuff!

M.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Dobson" <steve at dobson.org>
To: "Sussex Linux User Group" <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 11:00 AM
Subject: [Sussex] Breaking Patent News


> All
>
> In case you haven't heard IBM is announcing that they will be opening up
> their patent portfolio to the F/OSS community[1].  Currently 500 are
> being made available, and more maybe added later.  On the whole I see
> this as a good step forward in the fight against IP rights and the
>
> Steve
>
> [1]
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050110235654673
> http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf
>
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>