Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the largest single release of patent innovations into the open source community by any organization to date. Over 1,600 patents to be precise.
Only two weeks ago, IBM opened up access to 500 of their patents and at the time, it was the largest pledge.
Sun are giving open source developers free access to Sun OpenSolaris related patents under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO of Sun said,
"As the largest business contributor to the open source community, Sun has always been an ardent believer in open standards and the open source process going back to the inception of this company. The release of more than 1,600 patents associated with the Solaris OS far eclipses any other vendor's contribution. Today represents a huge milestone for Sun, for the community, for developers and for customers."
Sun hopes offering access to these patents will help facilitate innovation and help users get new open source products and technologies to market faster without having to obtain patent licenses from Sun.
By releasing the OpenSolaris OS platform under the CDDL, the open source community will immediately gain access to 1,600 active Sun patents for all aspects of operating system technologies.
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