Qualcomm is restructuring to insulate its patents and its revenue-producing licensing business from the foibles of open source licensing.

Apparently it’s been spooked by all the wireless patent litigation that going on worldwide because Thursday it said that parent company Qualcomm Incorporated will hold its crown jewels – described as most of the company’s patent portfolio – and license them through the Qualcomm Technology Licensing Division (QTL).

A new wholly owned subsidiary called Qualcomm Technologies Inc (QTI) will run its wireless chip business and handle R&D, including the company’s brushes with the open source world.

That’s intended to create a Chinese wall between QTL and QTI and limit its exposure to any claims resulting from QTI’s work with open source and its kumbaya sharing expectations.

Qualcomm hastened to add that the restructuring doesn’t mean either QTL or QCT is going to be spun out or that the move is in response to any third-party claims.

It’s just that it expects QTI and its subsidiaries to increasing work with open source software and “this restructuring will, among other things, help ensure that QTI and its subsidiaries’ activities do not result in the licensing of any of Qualcomm Incorporated’s patents, including its 3G and 4G patents.”

“Under the new structure,” it said, “QTI and its subsidiaries will own patents specifically developed for purposes of providing open source software contributions by QTI and its subsidiaries, whereas substantially all of the remainder of the company’s patent portfolio will continue to be owned by Qualcomm Incorporated. QTI and its subsidiaries will have no rights to grant licenses or other rights to patents held by Qualcomm Incorporated. There will be no changes to the intellectual property that is currently owned by Qualcomm Innovation Center Inc, which works closely with the open source community to accelerate the advancement of the wireless industry as a whole.”

Qualcomm figures the new structure will be in place sometime in calendar Q4.

FOSS Patents remarked that Qualcomm’s example is bound to have many other companies that make use of and/or contribute to open source software thinking “whether their corporate structure poses a risk to the enforceability of their patent rights.”

The popular patent litigation blog also figures that “the organizations behind certain popular open source licenses, such as the Free Software Foundation (GPL) or the Apache Software Foundation, will probably look closely at what Qualcomm is doing and discuss internally whether Qualcomm’s restructuring is a blueprint for all those who seek to circumvent the patent clauses of open source licenses in a way that runs counter to the spirit of those licenses or, even worse, renders the patent clauses of those licenses ineffectual.”