IBM does an about face and files a patent claim on ebXML, a XML encoding standard originally intended as a royalty-free specification for business information exchange. Actually, the patent claim in not on the specification itself, but on the protocols used to transmit or receive ebXML documents.
According to IBM’s disclosure statement, the company has one patent and one patent application that it believes are relevant to compliance with ebXML’s Collaboration Protocol Profiles (CPPs) and Collaboration Protocol Agreements (CPAs) specifications.
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“ebXML as an international standard is not very useful without the CPP and CPA specifications”
I am surprised at this move, as are I’m sure, the United Nations and everyone else who had intended to use or have already developed products using this specification. This kind of behavior I would have expected from the “usual suspects”, but apparently IBM’s participation on the ebXML committee has been strategic all along. If Microsoft had pursued a similar strategy with WSDL before they submitted it to the W3C, there would have been major fallout from those on the committee who were involved with developing the specification and the companies they represented. Fortunately, they didn’t, it’s gained critical mass, and now it is the major encoding standard used in the Google API
