The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is launching a new initiative called the OSDL patent commons project designed to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges will be housed for the benefit of the open source development community and industry.

This will make it easier for open source developers to make their patents available to share. It will also contain patents that are owned by the likes of IBM, Nokia, Novell, Red Hat and Sun but are pledged to the open source community.

By contributing patents to the OSDL patent commons project, patent holders can be assured that the right to enforce the patents is administered by an organization dedicating to accelerating the development and use of open source software. Developers can be assured that those patents will not be enforced against them on open source software.

While still in the planning stages, the OSDL patent commons project will initially involve a library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies and a collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community.

"Software patents are a huge potential threat to the ability of people to work together on open source," said Linus Torvalds. "Making it easier for companies and communities that have patents to make those patents available in a common pool for people to use is one way to try to help developers deal with the threat."

More details on the OSDL patent commons project will be announced in the coming months.

"OSDL is the ideal steward for such an important legal initiative as the patent commons project," said Eben Moglen, chair of the Software Freedom Law Center. "No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear."

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