Organizations (OIN), which protects the Linux ecosystem from patent claims, has surpassed the milestone of 3000 participants. Over the past two years, the number of OIN participants has increased by 50%. For example, since the beginning of this year alone, 350 new companies, communities, and organizations have joined OIN, signing a licensing agreement for patent sharing. OIN participants commit not to file patent claims and allow the use of patented technologies free of charge in projects related to the Linux ecosystem.
Among OIN's key participants, who contribute to forming a protective patent pool for Linux, are companies such as Google, IBM, NEC, Toyota, Renault, SUSE, Philips, Red Hat, Alibaba, HP, AT&T, Juniper, Facebook, Cisco, Casio, Fujitsu, Sony, and Microsoft. Companies that sign the agreement gain access to the patents held by OIN in exchange for their commitment not to file legal claims for the use of technologies employed in the Linux ecosystem. For instance, when joining OIN, Microsoft to OIN participants the right to use more than 60,000 of its patents, committing not to use them against Linux and open source software.
The agreement between OIN participants applies only to components of distributions that fall under the definition of a Linux system. Currently, the list includes 2873 packages, including the Linux kernel, Android platform, KVM, Git, nginx, CMake, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Lua, OpenJDK, WebKit, KDE, GNOME, QEMU, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt, systemd, X.Org, Wayland, etc. In addition to the non-aggression commitments, a patent pool has been formed within OIN, comprising patents acquired or freely transferred by participants related to Linux.
The OIN patent pool consists of over 1300 patents. In particular, OIN holds 22 patents from Microsoft that were previously sold to the AST consortium as patents affecting open source products. All OIN participants have the opportunity to use these patents free of charge. The effectiveness of the OIN agreement was confirmed by a decision from the U.S. Department of Justice, a group of patents that feature some of the earliest mentions of dynamic web content creation technologies that predated such systems as Microsoft's ASP, Sun/Oracle's JSP, and PHP. Another significant contribution is The Open Invention Network (OIN), which protects the Linux ecosystem from patent claims, to take OIN's interests into account in the patent sale agreement with Novell.
Source: opennet.ru
