[Ecommerce] CA makes a puddle in patent pool

[Michelle Childs]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/07/ca_patents/

<SNIP> CA's patents will be available under the Open Source Development
Labs' (OSDLs') recently announced Patent Commons Project.

CA makes a puddle in patent pool
By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 7th September 2005 21:06 GMT

Computer Associates International (CA) is cracking open the door on its
patent portfolio by releasing some of its IP to open source developers.

CA on Wednesday said it had released 14 of its patents covering
application development and modeling, business intelligence and analytics,
systems management and storage, and network management and security tools.

The software giant has some 280 patents in its portfolio, meaning CA is
opening up approximately two per cent of its intellectual property (IP).

CA's release follows larger donations by enterprise giants including IBM
and Sun Microsystems. IBM donated 500 patents to the community in January
while Sun announced plans to release its single sign-on, digital rights
management (DRM) and middleware stack having released 1,600 Solaris
patents earlier this year.

Sam Greenblatt, CA's senior vice president and strategic technical
advisor, defended his employer's tiny release saying CA is focusing on
quality not quantity.

"There are a lot of patents that can be thrown into open source. We want
to be sure the [patents] we put in are meaningful and can be utilized by
the open source community. They are infrastructure patents and people tend
to use them to develop systems management and other areas like storage,"
Greenblatt told The Register. CA's patents will be available under the
Open Source Development Labs' (OSDLs') recently announced Patent Commons
Project.

Asked whether CA planned to make more patents available to open source
developers, Greenblatt said CA was "always looking at the patent
portfolio."

In the meantime, CA is extending greater protection to developers through
a patent cross-licensing deal with IBM. The companies will exchange
license rights and leverage each other's IP to build new products and
services.

"I see the customer getting more benefit... [they are] getting mutual
technology without the customer having to worry about who's stepping on
whom. When you are a developer working on integrating other peoples'
products, you have to worry whether you have come close to the line in
using someone's patents," Greenblatt said.

While an agreement between the two was not unexpected, given CA's chief
executive is IBM's former vice president of software sales John Swainson,
the deal will likely do little to satisfy those campaigning against the
very existence of patents in software.

The company believes developers will become increasingly interested in
systems, network and storage management - areas covered by CA's patents -
as open source software moves into mission critical computing
environments. "You really need to get projects that are much more
industrial strength," Greenblatt said.

OSDL chief executive Stuart Cohen welecomed CA's move, saying it would
help encourage the growth of the patent commons. "We look forward to
working closely with CA as well as IBM and the other leaders in this area
as we develop a trusted vehicle and database for administering and
encouraging donations to the burgeoning patent commons," Cohen said.=AE



--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
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