Without getting overly gushy – these aren’t patent grants, after all – today’s patent news from Sun is a very welcome development. Sun’s clearly vying with IBM for King of the Open Source Hill status, or “King of the Commons” as it were, and customers and end users can only benefit. Further, it could herald a kind of “how open source are you?” arms race in enterprise software where the metric isn’t bits and bytes or features and functions, but community goodwill. In that vein, I’d be surprised if Novell didn’t jump in with its own big number before too long, given that they’ve already promised not use them to attack open source.
We still have a long way to go in remedying the inherent flaws in the current patent system as it pertains to software, but for one day at least, this put a smile on my face (and given my travel difficulties, that’s quite an accomplishment). Thanks, Sun.
Update: IBM’s Bob Sutor points out that the CDDL license used for the patents makes it incompatible with Linux and a host of other open source projects. Assuming that’s true – and I believe it is – it’s relevant, but it’s still a boon for open source.
License choices are an important consideration, but the bottom line here is that there are over 1600 new patents in the Commons. Don’t agree? Then ask yourself this: is Firefox a good thing for open source? Well, it’s license (MPL) is the basis for the CDDL. In a perfect world, everybody would use compatible licenses, but in the interim I’m in favor of anything supporting the Commons.
