Bank the T.D., Canada's second-largest financial holding company and Barclays, one of the world's largest financial conglomerates, joined the organization Open Invention the Network (OIN) which is an ecosystem that has the purpose of protecting Linux by the claims of the patent.
OIN members are committed to not filing patent claims and are free to use proprietary 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.
While for his part Barclays is interested in OIN's involvement to counter patent troll owning no assets and harassing dubious patent infringement claims against companies implementing new financial technologies.
For example, the patent troll Sound View has claimed patents affecting the Apache Hadoop platform, which is used by many banks and is protected by OINs. After a successful patent lawsuit against Wells Fargo and ongoing litigation with financial institution PNC, banks are trying to minimize patent risks by joining collective patent protection associations.
"The financial services and fintech industries are increasingly relying on open source technologies to build and integrate feature-rich platforms," said Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network. "As the first major North American bank to join our community, we are pleased that an established leader like TD is committed to patent non-aggression on the Linux kernel and adjacent open source technologies."
"We remain focused on leveraging the best technologies for our platforms and are excited to join the Open Invention Network (OIN), which supports protection against patent infringement claims for the good of the broader innovation community," said Josh. Death, Intellectual Property and Leader of Patentable Innovations in TD.
Barclays has also joined the LOT Network, a organization dedicated to fighting patent trolls and protect developers from patent lawsuits. The organization was founded in 2014 by Google, in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat, Dropbox, Netflix, Uber, Ford, Mazda, GM, Honda, Microsoft and some 300 other participants also joined the initiative.
LOT Network's protection method is based on cross-licensing from each participant's patents to all other participants, if these patents fall into the hands of a patent troll. Companies that join the LOT Network agree to license their patents free of charge to other LOT Network members if these patents are sold to other companies. In total, LOT Network now covers around 1,35 million patents.
Members of OIN include more than 3.300 businesses, communities and organizations who have signed license agreements to share patents. Among the main participants of OIN, providing the formation of a group of patents that protects Linux, 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.
Signatory companies get access to patents In power of the OIN in exchange for the commitment not to sue for the use of technologies used in the Linux ecosystem. Among other things, as part of joining the OIN, Microsoft transferred to OIN participants the right to use more than 60 of its patents, 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 ("Linux System"). Currently the list 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.
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