Shopify, which develops one of the largest e-commerce platforms for processing payments and organizing sales in both brick-and-mortar and online stores, has become a participant in the Open Invention Network (OIN), an organization dedicated to protecting the Linux ecosystem from patent claims. It is noted that the Shopify platform uses the Ruby on Rails framework, and the company considers open-source software a core foundation of its business. By joining OIN, the company aims to demonstrate its commitment to innovation and help protect against patent aggression affecting Linux-based systems.
Participants in OIN agree not to assert patent claims and grant free licenses to use patented technologies in projects related to the Linux ecosystem. OIN includes over 3,300 companies, communities, and organizations that have signed a licensing agreement for patent sharing. Key participants in OIN that contribute to creating a protective patent pool for Linux include companies such as Google, IBM, NEC, Toyota, Renault, SUSE, Philips, Red Hat, Alibaba, HP, AT&T, Juniper, Facebook, Cisco, Casio, Huawei, Fujitsu, Sony, and Microsoft.
Companies that sign the agreement gain access to the patents held by OIN in exchange for the commitment not to assert legal claims for the use of technologies employed in the Linux ecosystem. As part of joining OIN, Microsoft transferred to OIN participants the right to use more than 60 thousand of its patents, committing not to use them against Linux and open-source software.
The agreement among OIN participants only covers components of distributions that fall under the definition of a Linux system ('Linux System'). Currently, the list includes 3,393 packages, including the Linux kernel and the Android platform. KVM, Git, nginx, Apache Hadoop, CMake, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Lua, LLVM, OpenJDK, WebKit, KDE, GNOME, QEMU, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt, systemd, X.Org, Wayland, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. In addition to the non-aggression commitments, a patent pool has been formed within OIN, where patents related to Linux that are acquired or freely transferred by participants are included.
The OIN patent pool includes over 1,300 patents. Among these, OIN holds a group of patents featuring some of the earliest mentions of dynamic web content creation technologies, which preceded the emergence of systems like Microsoft ASP, Sun/Oracle JSP, and PHP. Another significant contribution was the acquisition in 2009 of 22 Microsoft patents that had previously been sold to the AST consortium as patents related to 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 a ruling from the U.S. Department of Justice, which required consideration of OIN's interests in the patent sale deal involving Novell.
Source: opennet.ru
