OpenID IPR: Past and Future
Last week, VeriSign issued a "non-assertion covenant" which promises that we will not enforce essential patents against developers implementing the OpenID Specification. This continues the path that Sun Microsystems announced at the Internet Identity Workshop a few weeks ago with their own promise.
Like Sun, we apply the condition that developers refrain from asserting their own (or others') patents against any other OpenID implementation developer. This thus means that developers do not need to do anything active in order to get this assurance; they do not need to obtain any license from us; they do not need to even think about licensing; they merely need to refrain from attempting to enforce their own (or others') patents against any developer implementing OpenID.
In addition to making existing OpenID specification safe for developers today, as part of the OpenID Foundation we're working with the wider Internet community to develop an Intellectual Property Rights Policy for future OpenID work. On June 5th I hosted a meeting with representatives attending from AOL, Microsoft, the OpenID Foundation, SUN, Symantec, VeriSign, and Yahoo! where we discussed the proposed IPR Policy. While there certainly is more work to do in this space, notes from the meeting can be found on the OpenID wiki.
