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Stuart Cohen, OSDL's chief executive, said the project--which is still in the planning stages--will make it easier for the open-source community to find and use patents that have been donated. A number of companies, including Nokia, IBM and Sun Microsystems have recently made open-source patent pledges.
"The OSDL patent commons project is designed to increase the utility and value of the growing number of patent pledges and promises in the past year by providing a central repository where intellectual property can be held for the benefit of all of us," said Cohen in a statement. "Our goal is to make it easier for developers and industry to take advantage of the good works of vendors, individuals and organizations who may wish to pledge patents and intellectual property in support of the community."
The patent commons project will include a library and database containing information on legal offerings that cover open source, including patent pledges and indemnification programs. More details on the project will be made available in the coming months, according to the OSDL.
Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, which offers free legal advice to those in the open-source movement, praised the initiative and called on the community to support the project.
"OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project. No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear," Moglen said in a statement.
But digital-media specialist Florian Mueller, a vocal opponent of software patents, said the initiative is unlikely to offer much protection to open-source developers, as the main way to protect yourself against patent infringement lawsuits is by countersuing. Companies that have pledged free use of their patents to the open-source community have not said whether open source developers can use their patents to launch legal counterattacks.
"It will only be a true protective shield if they gather patents that they can use to countersue the enemies of open source. The software patent game is like the Cold War: The only thing that protects you is the concept of mutually assured destruction. The patent pledges that IBM and Sun made added absolutely nothing to the retaliatory potential of open source. Those were just PR plays," said Mueller in a statement.
Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from London.
See more CNET content tagged:
Open Source Development Labs,
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open-source community,
software patent,
open source
So this project is good news, but of very little impact on the real problem. It can help in learning how to manage an open system that lets people find the technical info they need in existing technical knowledge.
What is really needed is a huge project to collect information on all past use of ideas, in a way that is accessible to those who need to defend themselves. That is, a database that can be used to easily find information that can invalidate a patent claim, or show that your work is based on "prior art". Or that can link you to applications created before a patent can issue, so you can use stuff that was written before a patent was issued when you need to infringe on a patent. It's one thing to sue you for writing code that infringes on a patent. It's another thing to sue you on using a component that does the same thing but existed before the patent was issued (say you find a function that was written in the 70's in fortran and does what you want. You cannot use it as is in a web page. You can translate it to javascript, keeping the same structure and functionality and documenting what you did. Then it might infringe on some patent. But whoever claims that it does, also claims that the fortran program from the 70's infringed on a future patent. Even a judge would understand it's somewhat absurd. The problem is how to find the fortran function that does exactly what you need but is buried inside an application that does something you don't understand in a system you don't understand. A very difficult problem to solve. I think one thing needed for this kind of thing is a technical knowledge repository that is open as a Wikipedia.
The patent system allows people (or corporations) to get patents on trivial concepts. Many of those were used in the past in some ways. Open code developers would never be able to "countersue" on patent infringement because even those patents whose owners allow open source developers to use freely do not belong to the open source community. They belong to they respective owners who allowed using them and not anything else. But open source developers might get some protection from smart use of existing components, if they can find them.