[Python-Dev] Recent IBM Patent releases

[Scott David Daniels]

IBM has recently released 500 patents for use in opensource code.

     http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf

     "...In order to foster innovation and avoid the possibility that a
     party will take advantage of this pledge and then assert patents or
     other intellectual property rights of its own against Open Source
     Software, thereby limiting the freedom of IBM or any other Open
     Source developer to create innovative software programs, the
     commitment not to assert any of these 500 U.S. patents and all
     counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is
     irrevocable except that IBM reserves the right to terminate this
     patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files
     a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights
     against Open Source Software."

Since this includes patents on compression and encryption stuff, we
will definitely be faced with deciding on whether to allow use of these
patents in the main Python library.

Somebody was worried about BSD-style licenses on Groklaw, and said,

     "Yes, you can use this patent in the free version... but if you
     close the code, you're violating IBM's Patents, and they WILL come
     after you. Think of what would have happened if IBM had held a
     patent that was used in the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack?  Microsoft used
     it as the base of the Windows NT TCP/IP stack. IBM could then sue
     Microsoft for patent violations."

To which he got the following reply:

     "Sorry, but that's not correct. That specific question was asked
     on the IBM con-call about this announcement. i.e. if there were a
     commercial product that was a derived work of an open source
     project that used these royalty-free patents, what would happen?

     "IBM answered that, so long as the commercial derived work followed
     the terms of the open source license agreement, there was no
     problem. (So IBM is fine with a commercial product based on an
     open source BSD project making use of these patents.)"

This means to me we can put these in Python's library, but it is
definitely something to start deciding now.

-- Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org