"Software patents are a huge potential threat to the ability of people to work together on open source," said Linus Torvalds (pictured) as the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) yesterday announced a new initiative called the Patent Commons project. 

 "Making it easier for companies and communities that have patents to make those patents available in a common pool for people to use is one way to try to help developers deal with the threat," Torvalds continued.

The patent commons project is designed to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges will be housed for the benefit of the open source development community and industry.

"Our goal is to make it easier for developers and industry to take advantage of the good works of vendors, individuals and organizations who may wish to pledge patents and intellectual property in support of the community," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL.

For many, the administrative and logistical challenges posed by granting individual licenses to the growing open source community can be a barrier to the formal licensing of patents. In addition, as more vendors such as IBM, Nokia, Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems pledge their intellectual property to the benefit of the open source community, to date there has not been a single, reliable place where developers and industry are able to advantage of these offerings.

By contributing patents to the OSDL patent commons project, patent holders can be assured that the right to enforce the patents is administered by an organization dedicating to accelerating the development and use of open source software. Developers can be assured that those patents will not be enforced against them on open source software.

"OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project," said Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center. "No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear."

While still in the planning stages, the OSDL patent commons project will initially involve a library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies. The library will also aggregate other legal solutions, such as indemnification programs offered by vendors of open source software. There will also be a collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community.

More details on the OSDL patent commons project will be announced in the coming months, said Cohen and Torvalds.

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