From: Joe Hunt 

Well, as one would expect, their announcement has received widely differing
reactions.  Lessig praised their action.  In a Register article, one
anti-software patents spokesperson noted that IBM is one of the strongest
supporters of the EU software patent initiative.

Here's the pdf listing the patents.

  http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf

I briefly looked at 2 patents.  One was filed in 1991 and had a patent date
in 1993.  Here's another:

---------------------------
United States Patent     6,310,630
Kulkarni ,   et al.     October 30, 2001
Data processing system and method for internet browser history generation

Abstract

A data processing system and method for generating browsing histories
during a worldwide web browsing session is implemented. As web pages are
visited, they are added to the browsing history so generated which is
organized in inverse chronological order. Each web page is further grouped
with the server which provided the web page in order to facilitate
subsequent random access to web pages that have been previously visited.
Each visited web page, and each server associated therewith, appears in the
history only once. In this way, the browsing history remains manageable,
and user access to previously visited websites is simplified.
---------------------------

That looks to me like it shouldn't even have been granted, due to
obviousness!  Of course, IANAL.

Joe



On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:24:54 -0500, "Geo"  wrote:

>"Joe Hunt"  wrote in message
>news:5l0cu05mtkm9bg2o7ndvu1mbhk70nv5j7t{at}4ax.com...
>
>> I've been trying to decide what IBM's motiviation is for this.
>
>It's lip service to the open source community. IBM patents about 3000 things
>per year, releasing 500 patents to open source is meaningless in that
>context. Did they even mention which patents?
>
>Geo. (maybe it's all things that expire soon anyway)
>

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