Computer Associates has cut a patent cross-license agreement with IBM and followed IBM down the path of pledging a set of 14 of its reportedly "key" US patents and their overseas counterparts to open source royalty-free. IBM pledged a bunch of patents earlier this year although Sun has disputed their utility.

CA's patent contribution was characterized as a response to IBM's call for owners of intellectual property to accelerate interoperability and the adoption of open source software. The patents covered by CA's non-assertion pledge address various technologies and CA says they can be used in a full range of open source projects.

CA says the patents cover application development and modeling that automates translation between programming languages and provides visual modeling and editing of data objects to create more powerful, flexible programming tools; business intelligence and analytics that simplify the visualization of complex multi-dimensional data techniques with neural networking technology and efficient management of the aggregation and population of data marts; and a few other key areas.

(This is an abridged version of a story that originally ran at www.clientservernrews.com)