IBM today announced that it is granting universal and perpetual access to certain intellectual property that might be necessary to implement more than 150 standards designed to make software interoperable.

Software standards must be implementable in any software or business model, including those based on Free Software. When patents are included in software standards, they need to be licensed in a manner that doesn’t restrict their implementation in any way. Besides the absence of any other restriction, that means royalty-free licensing to any party implementing the standard.

The so-called reform, which was proposed as an Easy Fix™ to be applied to the USPTO, has always been rather impotent. It kept the problems in tact where intellectual monopolies could benefit and perhaps harmed some of the smaller players, including the patent trolls

The Obama rule against software patents; studies suggest intellectual monopolies are harmful

A defense of software patents backfires in the eyes of some; more news about the harms of intellectual monopolies

IBM has just announced a new corporate policy regarding its "behavior when helping to create open technical standards".

Behind the scenes, Microsoft is trying to promote RAND (for standards) while acquiring more XML patents

"I’ve just taken a first look at IBM’s promise not to assert its patents involved in implementing 150 software standards and it appears to be a work of art in its simplicity."

On Friday FSFE sent a letter to the European Commission to support Open Standards and interoperability. In the drawn-out battle to retain at least a weak recommendation for Open Standards in the revised European Interoperability Framework, FSFE has countered a leaked letter by the lobby group Business Software Alliance with its own thorough analysis of the relation between standards and patents.