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"Crucially, two of those were patents that IBM explicitly promised never to raise against open source."

What sort of weight does that promise carry? It's hard not to draw parallels to the .NET patent discussion. Maybe these sorts of promises don't mean anything because they still have enough related patents to sink a free software project.

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The promise is legally binding. IBM has no chance of winning an infringement suit over those two patents against an open source project as defined in their pledge here: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf

It's highly likely that their inclusion of those two patents in the list of 150+ they say TurboHercules might be infringing is an oversight, and if they file suit and include those, the defendants will have no trouble getting a summary judgement throwing them out.

Not that this will help much--IBM has made no such promise about the other 150+ patents.

One of the parallels is that Microsft took one of IBM's patent architects to help them build their portfolio. I can't find his name right now :(

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