This week I’ve been working with/looking into Web Services, specifically SOAP and its related standards. In the course of my investigations I found that one of the related security standards, SAML, is under patent by RSA. I tripped across this fact when reading the front page of the OpenSAML project. For all I know, other parts of SOAP might be under patent as well, but I haven’t tripped across a reference, nor have I gone looking.
This got me thinking about how, in my view, patents and open standards shouldn’t mix. If a standard is to be truly open, it needs to be freely implementable by everyone. Without open standards we wouldn’t have much of the technology we now take for granted: e-mail and the web being two obvious examples. A standard that has parts of it under patent could potentially harm small businesses as well as the open source developer.
I started to do some research to write this blog post, and came across a paper that covers everything I would have wanted to talk about and then some. The Problem of Software Patents in Standards is written by Bruce Perens. Its a fairly short paper and talks about the current situation in software patents, what various standards bodies are doing to address the problem, and he make recommendations about resolving the problems around this issue.
As more technology standards are being defined in the real estate industry, it is my hope that the standards bodies in the industry keep thoughts like this in mind.
I came across some definitions that could be used in this discussion. If course, they are offerred in the realm of the Open Document Format (ODF) versus Microsoft Word format debate, but I thought they might be relevant.