CA Joins Forces With IBM In Bid To Create Patent Commons Project

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

09 September 2005

Computer Associates International, Inc. on Wednesday pledged open access to key innovations covered by 14 of its US patents - and counterparts of these patents issued in other countries - for individuals and groups working on open source software.

CA also announced it has reached a long-term, patent cross license agreement with IBM, creating an exchange of license rights and releases between the companies.

In making its patent pledge to the open source community, CA has joined IBM in encouraging other companies to create an industry-wide “patent commons” in which patents are pledged royalty-free to further innovation in areas of broad interest to developers and users of information technology. IBM made a similar pledge earlier this year.

“CA is committed to make appropriate types of intellectual property available to open source developers and customers free of any royalties or licensing fees so that innovation and high-value development can flourish,” explained Mark Barrenechea, executive vice president of technology strategy and chief technology architect at CA.

He continued:

“We have a strong commitment to promoting innovation through open source and open standards, and we will continue to strengthen our position as the leading provider of management and security solutions in this market segment.”

The patents covered by CA's non-assertion pledge address a wide variety of technology challenges and can be used in a full range of open source projects. They include:

• Application development and modeling that automates translation between programming languages and provides visual modeling and editing of data objects to create more powerful, flexible programming tools;
• Business intelligence and analytics that simplify visualization of complex multi-dimensional data techniques with neural networking technology and efficient management of the aggregation and population of data marts;
• Systems management and storage management solutions that provide intelligent process controls to maximize system performance and storage utilization; and
• Network management and security tools that enhance visualization of network traffic patterns and congestion, selectively capture and filter network traffic, and provide granular session control capabilities.

Recommended