IBM frees up patents

WHILE MICROSOFT and Apple are getting increasingly proprietary, IBM is granting universal and perpetual access to its IP in a bid to make software more interoperable.

Biggish Blue said it will not assert any patent rights to its technologies featured nearly 200 standards including SOAP, SAML, XML Schema, and Service Component Architecture. WS-* specifications.

Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards said that the standards related to the core infrastructure standards which people use around such things as SOA.

According to Computerworld, the move is a bid to get people to develop more software which uses the standards.

IBM didn't develop many of the standards, but since the company did contribute to their development it has some IP control.

Much of the technology previously could be applied on a royalty-free basis but it required users to go through a royalty-free licensing process, which involved filling out forms.

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