The Open Invention Network (OIN), which aims to protect the Linux ecosystem from patent claims, has announced an expansion of the list of packages covered by the patent non-assertion agreement and the ability to freely use certain patented technologies.
The list of components in distributions that fall under the definition of the Linux System covered by the agreement among OIN participants has been expanded to include 337 packages. Newly added packages include the .Net platform, standard C libraries Musl and uClibc-ng, the Nix package manager, the OpenEmbedded platform, the Prometheus monitoring system, the mbed-tls cryptographic library, services of the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) distribution, ONNX, tvm, Helm, Notary, Istio, CoreOS, SPDX, AGL Services, OVN, FuseSoc, Verilator, Flutter, Jasmine, Weex, NodeRED, Eclipse Paho, Californium, Cyclone, and Wakaama.
As a result, the definition of the Linux system now includes 3730 packages, including the Linux kernel, Android platform, KVM, Git, nginx, CMake, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Lua, LLVM, OpenJDK, WebKit, KDE, GNOME, QEMU, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt, systemd, X.Org, Wayland, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. The number of OIN participants who have signed the patent-sharing license agreement has exceeded 3,500 companies, communities, and organizations.
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 applied in the Linux ecosystem. Key OIN participants that contribute to forming the patent pool that protects Linux include companies like Google, IBM, NEC, Toyota, Renault, SUSE, Philips, Red Hat, Alibaba, HP, AT&T, Juniper, Facebook, Cisco, Casio, Huawei, Fujitsu, Sony, and Microsoft. For example, Microsoft, which joined OIN, committed not to use over 60,000 of its patents against Linux and open source software.
The Open Invention Network (OIN) patent pool includes over 1,300 patents. This includes a group of patents held by OIN that feature some of the earliest mentions of dynamic web content creation technologies, which preceded the emergence of systems like ASP from Microsoft, JSP from Sun/Oracle, and PHP. Another significant contribution was the acquisition of 22 patents from Microsoft in 2009, which 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 effectiveness 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 with Novell.
Source: opennet.ru
