Sun offers patents for open source developers

In a similar move to IBM's much talked about patent handout for OSS developers, Sun Systems are offering more than 1,600 patents that they own for open source developers in Solaris projects. Although many will complain that this is another PR exercise, it must be said that there seems to be a growing understanding from OSS friendly enterprises that the open source model needs some software patents to support the model if the patent wars break out.