EFF signs up Novell for software patent disputes

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 24 May 2007 at 12:49

Novell has signed up to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and its patent busting campaigns.

The organisations have announced that they will work on reforms to software patents worldwide. As well as lobbying governments and international organizations on patent-related issues - specifically the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) - Novell says it will contribute 'significant resources' to EFF's 'Patent Busting' project.

Launched in 2004, the project is intended to attack 'bogus' patents that impose a heavy burden on software developers and Net users. It seeks to identify prior art that can be used to invalidate the patents, and also to invalidation them through re-examination efforts.

'It is increasingly obvious that software patents are not a meaningful measure of innovation,' said Jeff Jaffe, chief technology officer at Novell. 'As a long-time innovator in the industry and a holder of many significant patents, we understand the rationale behind the patent system in general. But we believe that software patent system reform is necessary to promote software innovation going forward.'

For its part, the EFF is glad to have Novell on board: 'The support of Novell - a company founded on the proprietary software development model but now strongly embracing the open source approach - will be a great boon to our efforts to rid the industry of innovation-killing patents,' said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. 'We hope Novell's example encourages other software vendors to join the effort.'

The significance of Novell joining the campaign is its recent, controversial alignment with Microsoft over cross-platform support for SUSE Linux, with Microsoft subsequently questioning the legal basis of Linux, in terms of patent infringements.

Microsoft recently re-stoked the fires of this dispute by declaring that 235 such infringements existed, but it has yet to provide details. The gist of the open source response - as with the SCO-IBM case - is that as soon as any details emerge of specific infringements emerge, the open source community can simply code alternative approaches.