New white papers offer advice in using open source patents

The Open Source Development Labs has published two white papers that assist developers and corporate IT managers to use patents that have been pledged to open source.

The documents are part of the OSDL's patent commons project, in which the organisation is building a library of patents that have been pledged to open source and the terms under which they are being made available.

The project also published a paper that aims to attract additional pledges by providing an overview of considerations that developers and corporations need to make.

Several patent holders have pledged patents to open source in the past year, promising not to enforce patent violations by open source projects.

IBM, for instance, has pledged a group of 500 patents to all open source projects, but other vendors have put more restrictions in place.

Nokia's pledge is limited to the Linux kernel, while Sun Microsystems is promising only to safeguard software governed by the Common Development and Distribution Licence.

The Patent Commons project aims to build a library with information on all patents that have been pledged to open source.