TD Bank, Canada's second largest financial holding, and Barclays, one of the world's largest financial conglomerates, have joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), an organization dedicated to protecting the Linux ecosystem from patent claims. Members of the OIN undertake not to make patent claims and freely allow the use of patented technologies in projects related to the Linux ecosystem.
TD Bank is interested in supporting the Linux ecosystem, as it actively uses open source software in its infrastructure, financial services and fintech platforms. Barclays is interested in OIN's involvement to counter asset-less patent trolls who harass questionable patent infringement claims against companies implementing new financial technologies. For example, the patent troll Sound View claimed to have patents affecting the Apache Hadoop platform, which is used by many banks and is protected by the OIN. After a successful patent lawsuit against Wells Fargo holding and the commencement of proceedings with the financial institution PNC, banks are trying to minimize patent risks by joining associations engaged in collective protection from patent claims.
OIN members include more than 3300 companies, communities and organizations that have signed a patent-sharing license agreement. Among the main OIN participants that ensure the formation of a patent pool that protects 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. Companies that sign the agreement gain access to patents held by OIN in exchange for a commitment not to sue for the use of technologies used in the Linux ecosystem. In particular, as part of joining the OIN, Microsoft transferred the right to use more than 60 of its patents to OIN participants, pledging not to use them against Linux and open source software.
The agreement between OIN members applies only to components of distributions that fall under the definition of a Linux system (βLinux Systemβ). The list currently includes 3393 packages, including Linux kernel, 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 non-aggression obligations, for additional protection, the OIN has formed a patent pool, which includes patents purchased or donated by participants related to Linux.
The OIN patent pool includes over 1300 patents. Including in the hands of OIN is a group of patents, which featured some of the first mentions of technologies for creating dynamic web content, which anticipated the emergence of such systems as Microsoft's ASP, Sun/Oracle's JSP and PHP. Another significant contribution is the acquisition in 2009 of 22 Microsoft patents that had previously been sold to the AST consortium as patents affecting "open source" products. All OIN members have the opportunity to use these patents free of charge. The effectiveness of the OIN agreement was confirmed by the decision of the US Department of Justice, which demanded that the interests of OIN be taken into account in the terms of the deal to sell the Novell patents.
The Barclays conglomerate has also joined the LOT Network, an organization dedicated to fighting patent trolls and protecting developers from patent lawsuits. The organization was founded in 2014 by Google, in addition to which the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat, Dropbox, Netflix, Uber, Ford, Mazda, GM, Honda, Microsoft and about 300 other members also joined the initiative. The LOT Network protection method is based on cross-licensing the patents of each participant for all other participants if these patents fall into the hands of a patent troll. Companies that join LOT Network undertake to license their patents free of charge to other members of LOT Network if these patents are sold to other companies. In total, the LOT Network now covers about 1.35 million patents.
Source: opennet.ru