Open standards and closed code

IBM is opening up a small part of it's patent portfolio to drive SOA adoption. The article has a quote - "This is telling people go for it and code using these open standards,". What exactly is open here? If it is open, why does IBM have patents on it? I haven't seen the patents here (you know the lawyers actually ask you not to do a patent search!) but it rather seems odd that you have patents on open standards that you make it available to the developers and actually get credit for them. The article also says - "I'm not sure how much developers worry about this stuff anyway," - right on. This is absolutely true. This is a pure PR play and demonstrates some of the issues with our current patent system and the patent stockpiling tactics that organizations employ. The actual impact of the patents to SOA adoption in general is questionable.