IBM to improve software patent quality

IBM has joined other big players in the open source community and has expressed that it will use OSS in order to improve the quality of software patents in the United States. The idea is to have a searchable software code repository that will make it easier to detemine if the software has prior art or not. The other people involved are Open Source Development Labs, Novell, Red Hat and SourceForge.net.

This is yet another encouraging piece of news from Big Blue, but I wonder if the pro-patent lobby will agree to release source code.