An interesting announcement from Novell.
Novell's NEW PATENT POLICY 12 Oct 2004 Dear Valued Customer: Today Novell expands its commitment to you by putting its extensive patent portfolio squarely behind its customers, and we thought you'd like to know about it. Our motivations are simple: protect customer choice and preserve marketplace innovation. Novell has just issued a statement announcing our preparedness, if necessary, to use our own patent portfolio - which covers technologies with significant value and widespread deployment in the IT sector today - to defend against patent attacks on open source products we deliver. Both the press release and policy statement are available at http://NovellNzone.rsc03.net/servlet/cc5?ghNQUWAQWVIjHKxkLtmQLKmV2VR This initiative is aimed at any vendor that tries to mislead customers using intellectual property rights as a reason to avoid pursuit of an open source offering. To our knowledge, no vendor has actually filed a patent suit against an open source product. Instead, some appear to be simply trying to sow doubts in the minds of customers to avoid competing on technical merits, security, quality of service and value. Novell believes that open source software poses no greater risk of patent infringement than does closed source software. I believe our Chairman, Jack Messman, said it best when he stated, ?Our approach is to protect customer choice, not threaten it, and support the innovation inherent in the open source model. With this policy, we're saying we'll use our patents to actively protect Novell's open source technologies against any third party asserting patent claims against our offerings. We will use our patents for the original purpose patents were established ? to encourage innovation ? not to shut down options for customers. We hope our leadership in this arena will lead other patent holders to take a similar stance.? I greatly appreciate the trust and confidence you have placed in Novell. Sincerely, Ronald W. Hovsepian President, Novell North America
