Huawei Company among the licensees and participants of the organization (OIN), which is engaged in protecting the Linux ecosystem from patent claims. OIN participants agree not to make patent claims and grant free permission to use patented technologies in projects related to the Linux ecosystem. Huawei holds a significant number of patents in communication, cloud technologies, smart devices, and electronics.
More than 3,200 companies, communities, and organizations that have signed a licensing agreement for the joint use of patents are part of OIN. Major participants in OIN that contribute to the establishment of a patent pool protecting Linux include companies like Google, IBM, NEC, Toyota, Renault, SUSE, Philips, Red Hat, Alibaba, HP, AT&T, Juniper, Facebook, Cisco, Casio, Fujitsu, Sony, and Microsoft. Companies that have signed the agreement gain access to the patents held by OIN in exchange for the commitment not to file legal claims regarding the use of technologies applied within the Linux ecosystem. This includes Microsoft's participation in OIN. 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 the participants of OIN only covers components of distributions that fall under the definition of the Linux System. Currently, it includes 2,873 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 to include patents related to Linux that are acquired or freely transferred by the participants.
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 In 2009, 22 Microsoft patents, which had previously been sold to the AST consortium, were identified as patents affecting open source products. All OIN participants have the opportunity to use these patents free of charge. The validity of the OIN agreement was confirmed by the decision of the U.S. Department of Justice. to take OIN's interests into account in the patent sale agreement with Novell.
Source: opennet.ru
