Novell have announced that they plan to use their patent portfolio to protect any of their open source software.
In real terms, that means that popular applications like Evolution, as well as many apps integral with SUSE will be protected from patent claims. In short, if you think you have a patent claim against these apps, then you better make sure you are not using anything for which Novell might have a patent.
Good news for the thriving Open Source community as much of what is contained in SUSE Linux is also contained in many other distributions. Popular open source applications that web developers might know about are: Apache, PHP, Perl, Mozilla (Firefox/Thunderbird), OpenOffice.org and TheGimp. I suspect that it will not be long until IBM and possibly HP do the same, and when they do, Sun will probably be pressured to do likewise. Once they are all on board, anyone planning to take on one of the OSS projects for patent infringement, will have to deal with the biggest combined patent portfolio on the planet.
While this is not as good as a total revamp of broken software patents to have then reflect the actual software industry instead of copying non software patents, this will certainly help for now. Read the full story at Eweek.
Regards
Franki
