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
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org
Received on 10/12/04
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 12/19/08 EST