“Last year IBM took a significant step forward in cooperation
with the free software community, by offering blanket licenses for
500 of its patents to all free software developers. This does not
cover all of IBM’s software patents, which must number in the
thousands. And there are other areas where IBM does not yet
cooperate with the free software community–they have not provided
the necessary information to port a free BIOS to ThinkPads, for
instance, and they are still pursuing Treacherous Computing.
Nonetheless, this is a real step. Recently Sun made an announcement
that superficially seems similar. It said that Sun had given us
‘free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common
Development and Distribution License.’ But those words do not
really make sense. The CDDL is a license for the copyright on
software, not a policy for licensing patents. It applies to
specific code and nothing else. (Copyright and patents have
essentially nothing in common in the requirements they impose on
the public…)”