Southern California Edison applied for a patent on smart meters last year. While it is a little nerve-wracking to have one company patent business use of a technology that’s crucial to helping Americans use energy more efficiently, Southern California Edison appears to be acting with good intentions. According to Earth2tech.com, the utility says that it requested the patent as a protective measure, to keep other companies from patenting business use of the smart meter technology and charging for it. Southern California Edison will give the licenses away for free. The final version of the license agreement for smart meters will be posted on Southern California Edison’s website this week, on October 1st.

Earth2tech.com talked to Paul De Martini, the VP of Edison SmartConnect, who made the following comments:

De Martini said on the call that SCE would have rather worked with an open source repository to try to defend its use of smart meters, but at the time the repository wasn’t available. If the repository is ready in the future, SCE plans to work with it to protect other business use cases, like guidelines for the connection of plug-in electric vehicles to the power grid, De Martini said. He also said he is hopeful that an open source project will be available before the end of the year.