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 of distributions that fall under the definition of the Linux system, to which the agreement between OIN participants applies, has been expanded to 800 packages. Among the new packages in the list, standout components include AGL (Automotive Grade Linux), Android Wear, Apache Solr, Apache Atlas, ash,
bacula, bazel, chromium, cinnamon, couchdb, cups-filters, Dolphin, dotnet, eudev, fltk, FuseSoc, grafana, icewm, istio, falco, jenkins, kate, kernel-rt, ldb, libadwaita, libcamera, mbedtls, nano, openchange, opensearch, openthread, scipy, sddm, spire, terraform, tesseract, vagrant, verilator, vulkan-tools, wayland-utils, xwayland, and zlib-ng.
As a result, the definition of the Linux system now encompasses 4530 packages, including the Linux kernel, the Android platform, KVM, Git, nginx, CMake, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, QEMU, Kubernetes, KVM, Lua, LLVM, OpenJDK, WebKit, KDE, GNOME, QEMU, Firefox, LibreOffice, OpenStack, Qt, systemd, X.Org, Wayland, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and so on. The number of OIN participants who have signed the patent sharing agreement has surpassed 3800 companies, communities, and organizations.
OIN participants commit not to file patent claims and grant permission to use patented technologies in projects related to the Linux ecosystem without charge. More than 3800 companies, communities, and organizations have signed the patent sharing agreement, which is a part of OIN. Among the key OIN participants that help form a protective patent pool for Linux are companies like Google, Amazon, 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 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
