OIN expands its patent catalog with 337 new packages

La Open Invention Network (OIN), whose goal is to protect the Linux ecosystem from patent claims, announced a few days ago the expansion of the list of packages which are subject to a patent-free agreement and the provision of the possibility of royalty-free use of certain proprietary packages, as well as certain technologies.

The list of distribution components that are included in the definition of a Linux system, which is covered by the OIN member agreement, has been expanded to 337 packages.

In the news that he released through a blog post, he mentions that new software packages or components that are added to the Linux ecosystem They include several renowned projects, among which the following stand out: .Net, ONNX, tvm, Prometheus, Helm, Notary, Istio, Nix, OpenEmbedded, CoreOS, uClibc-ng, mbed-tls, musl, SPDX, AGL Services, OVN, FuseSoc, Verilator, Flutter, Jasmine, Weex, NodeRED, Eclipse Paho, Californium, Cyclone and Wakaama, among others.

With this new expansion, 337 new software components are included, which continues to increase the number of protected packages, which today consists of about 3.730.

“Linux and open source collaboration continue to thrive as they accelerate the pace of transformation across a spectrum of industries. With this update, we have addressed expansion across key software projects and platforms. Additionally, we have added protection for strategic packages that enable the design of hardware and embedded applications,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN. 

It is mentioned that this update continues the well established OIN policy to apply a conservative, consensus-driven, and community-informed approach to adding core open source functionality to the definition of the Linux ecosystem.

In total, the Linux system definition covers 3730 packages, including the Linux kernel, the platform Android, 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 exceeded 3500 companies, communities and organizations.

“This update to the Linux system definition allows OIN to keep pace with open source innovation, promoting non-aggression of patents in the core. As open source grows, we will continue to protect it by deliberately adding software packages to the Linux system."

Notably the companies that sign the agreement obtain access to patents held by OIN in exchange for a commitment not to sue for the use of technologies used in the Linux ecosystem.

Major OIN participants ensuring the formation of a patent pool protecting Linux include 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 the OIN, has pledged not to use more than 60.000 of its patents against Linux and open source software.

OIN's patent pool includes more than 1300 patents. In OIN's hands is a group of patents, featuring some of the first mentions of technologies for creating dynamic web content, which heralded the rise of systems such as Microsoft's ASP, Sun/Oracle's JSP, and PHP.

Another important contribution is the acquisition in 2009 of 22 Microsoft patents that had previously been sold to the AST consortium as patents covering "open source" products.

All OIN members have the opportunity to use these patents for free. The effectiveness 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 agreement to sell Novell's patents.

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the original note in the following link


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