[Sussex] Breaking Patent News

[Steve Dobson]

Mark

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 11:49:17AM -0000, Mark Harrison wrote:
> 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!

This does seam to be a measure to stop SCO like action.  If you use any
F/OSS software that contains any of these IBM patents, and Linux almost
certainly does (remember the OSRM study that identified around 300 patents
that might be infringed by Linux), then IBM an revoke your rights to use
these patents.

Steve