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Today

In conjuction with the Burton Group Catalyst Conference going on in San Francisco this week, Sun has issued two "non-assertion covenants," which are proactive promises coming from Sun about not enforcing patents against developers using SAML v2.0 as well as the Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange Protocol and Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile.

For SAML, this means that developers of SAML technology can be assured that Sun will not impose on them any licensing terms, conditions or fees for the use of any patents held by Sun related to SAML v2.0. Developers need not do anything active in order to get this assurance; they merely need to refrain from attempting to enforce their own (or others') patents against any other SAML-implementing developer.

Sun is doing this because SAML is a critically important technology, and we think it's important to provide as many assurances we can to developers implementing SAML technology -- particularly open-source developers.

For more information, check out the OASIS Security Services Technical Committee (SAML group) IPR page:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/security/ipr.php

Likewise, for Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange Protocol and Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile, Sun's non-assertion covenant means developers of Web SSO Interop technology can be assured that Sun will not impose on them any licensing terms, conditions or fees for the use of any patents held by Sun related to the Web SSO Interop specs.

The Web SSO specs were jointly authored and published in draft form by Sun and Microsoft and can be found here:
http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/identity/interop/index.html

Both authoring companies of these specs have already offered royalty-free terms on patent licensing, but Sun is simply choosing to be more concrete and to help remove development barriers by offering the non-assertion promise explained above. We want to provide as many assurances we can to developers implementing Web SSO Interop technology -- again particularly for open-source developers.