IBM open sources millions of lines of its code

IBM has decided to contributute more than half a million lines of its software code, valued at $85 million, to the Apache Foundation. The move, according to the NYT, “is one of the largest transfers ever of proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making the code contribution to try to help make it easier and more appealing for software developers to write applications in the Java programming language”.

The code is for the Cloudscape Java database, an integral part of IBM’s WebSphere (which competes head-on with Microsoft’s dot-Net). From now on, Apache will hold the licensing and intellectual property rights to the Cloudscape code.

Hmmm… interesting.