IBM Releasing 500 patents to 'patent commons'

Lessig posted on this story, and he's quoted in it as well. I think the importance of this cannot be understated. While IBM has released some open source code, these 500 or so patents apply to 14 catagories of IBM's technology, including e-commerce and web communication. All that being said, it seems IBM is trying to have it both ways, and they just may be able to, leveraging the traditional corporate model for intellectual property management of patent generation and royalty collection and open source contributions as a stimulus for innovation and market development simultaneously. It'll be interesting to see what develops out of the patent commons, and as always, what the tech-pundits have to say.