IBM has dug into its huge bag of patents and pull out 500 of them that opened up to the open source community. The patents will cover a wide range of technologies from databases, operating systems, language recognition, and protocols for exporting files to name a few. 

The company plans to grant royalty-free access to more patents in the future for open-source use, a representative said Monday. It also plans to release patents for use in open standards--a move that could make it easier to embrace such standards within open-source and proprietary software.