CA Opens 14 Patents To Developers

CA pledged the patents, royalty free, to the open source community for further development of information technology. IBM made a similar pledge earlier this year. Both companies are encouraging other companies to create an industry-wide patent commons.

Jim Stallings, IBM's vice president of intellectual property, said in a statement that the sharing of intellectual property will help accelerate interoperability and the adoption of open source software.

The patents included under CA's pledge can be used in several open source projects in the following areas: application development and modeling, business intelligence and analytics, systems management and storage management solutions, and network management and security tools.

The agreement marks a new business relationship that will stimulate development of solutions, while allowing flexible combination of products in an on-demand environment, according to Mark Barrenechea, chief technology architect at CA.

To qualify for the program, licenses of solutions using CA intellectual property must be certified by opensource.org.