Monday, August 15, 2005

Patent Commons project announced

An interesting piece of news via Axel Horn's blog. Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is starting a patent project for Open Source. It will house a database containing information about patents and patent pledges for the benefit of the OSS community. According to the release from OSDL, the project will contain the following:

  • A library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies. The library will also aggregate other legal solutions, such as indemnification programs offered by vendors of open source software.
  • A collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community.
This will be a useful resource for OSS developers, particularly considering that software patents are going nowhere.

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