The Open Invention Network is a community of patent owners dedicated to protecting Linux from patent lawsuits. Community members contribute patents to a common pool, allowing those patents to be used freely by all members.
OIN has about two and a half thousand participants, including companies such as IBM, SUSE, Red Hat, Google.
Today in the company blog It was announced that Microsoft was joining the Open Invention Network, thereby opening up more than 60 thousand proprietary patents to OIN participants.
According to Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN: βThis is almost everything Microsoft has, including older open-source technologies such as Android, the Linux kernel and OpenStack and new ones such as LF Energy and HyperLedger, their predecessors and successors."
Source: linux.org.ru