Islandia, New York-based CA’s development architect and European open source lead, Marcel den Hartog, told ComputerWire that details of the patent pledge are being worked through by CA’s chief executive, John Swainson, and CTO, Yogesh Gupta.
It’s the plan, den Hartog said. I know he [Swainson] has worked on the preliminary work to get that done. Swainson joined CA in November 2004 from IBM Corp, which in January pledged 500 patents to the open source community.
Although details are thin on the ground, den Hartog said CA’s motive is to remove any suggestion that the company might hold a threat of litigation over Linux or other open source projects.
In August 2004, a group called Open Source Risk Management claimed to have identified 287 patents that could cover technologies in the Linux kernel, including 27 Microsoft Corp patents and 98 patents owned by so-called Linux-friendly companies, although it also noted that none of these patents had been tested in court.
CA’s plan is the latest move by one of those Linux-friendly companies to make it clear that they do not intend to use patents against Linux. In October 2004, Novell Inc vowed to use its patent portfolio to protect open source products against third-party patent challenges.
Compared with the likes of IBM, CA is not a major patent holder but it has built up a number of patents through its numerous acquisitions over the years, and de Hartog said the company is in the process of identifying any patents that might apply to open source. A lot of these patents, in a lot of cases, aren’t even used in [CA] products, he said.
While CA is planning to pledge patents to open source, den Hartog ruled out an imminent large-scale donation of CA software code to the open source community, following its release of the Ingres database management system under an open source license last year.
Open sourcing Ingres for us was 50% rational and 50% uncertainty to be honest, he said. We knew we could develop quickly, we knew it was a commodity product, we knew it was strategic to CA, and we knew we needed to compete in a different way. All those things came together. We didn’t know if it would be accepted by the open source community. Six months on and despite tens of thousands of downloads and numerous submitted changes to the code, CA is still wary about releasing more products under open source. We still don’t have a clear picture of the consequences of moving Ingres to open source, he said.
We need to have a good picture of how it has impacted on revenue, he added. We need to make sure we can still deliver the right level of maintenance and support. We will still donate code, but it will be small to donations. To give revenue generating products away…Ingres was a hard decision.
As for the development of Ingres, new versions for Hewlett-
Packard Co’s OpenVMS and HP-UX operating systems are in the works, with de Hartog revealing that HP itself has taken the lead on migration, while there is also the intention to make Ingres capable of running SAP AG’s e-business applications.
That plan will be boosted by CA’s internal deployment of SAP as its new enterprise resource planning and accounting system, announced in late 2004. I understand it’s part of the deal of using it internally, said den Hartog.
