The Open Invention Network (OIN), which aims to protect the Linux ecosystem from patent claims, announced an expansion of the list of packages that are covered by a non-patent agreement and the possibility of free use of certain patented technologies.
The list of distribution components that fall under the definition of the Linux System (βLinux Systemβ), which is covered by the agreement between the OIN participants, has been expanded to 337 packages. New packages included in the list include the .Net platform, standard C libraries Musl and uClibc-ng, Nix package manager, OpenEmbedded platform, Prometheus monitoring system, mbed-tls crypto library, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) automotive distribution services, 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 Linux system definition covers 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 members who have signed a patent sharing license agreement has surpassed 3500 companies, communities and organizations.
Companies that sign the agreement gain access to patents held by OIN in exchange for an obligation not to pursue legal claims for the use of technologies used in the Linux ecosystem. Among the main participants of OIN, ensuring the formation of a patent pool protecting Linux, are 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. For example, Microsoft, which joined OIN, pledged not to use more than 60 thousand of its patents against Linux and open source software.
The OIN patent pool includes more than 1300 patents. Among other things, OIN holds a group of patents that contain some of the first mentions of technologies for creating dynamic web content, which foreshadowed the emergence of such systems as ASP from Microsoft, JSP from Sun/Oracle 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 covering βopen sourceβ 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 US Department of Justice, which required that OIN's interests be taken into account in the terms of the transaction for the sale of Novell patents.
Source: opennet.ru