Open Invention Network (OIN) is an intellectual property rights company based in Durham, United States. It operates as an entity specialising in the acquisition of

patents A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

, subsequently granting royalty-free licenses to its community members. These members are obligated not to assert their own patents against

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and its associated systems and applications as per the terms of the licensing agreements established by OIN.

History

OIN was incorporated on 31 October 2005 and is headquartered in Durham, NC. The founding members,

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, and

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

initiated the organisation on November 10 of the same year. Subsequently,

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

joined the consortium as a member. Notably, in December 2013,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

became a member, while

Toyota is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on August 28, 1937. Toyota is the List of manuf ...

announced its membership in July 2016. On October 10, 2018, Erich Andersen, representing

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

, disclosed their participation as a licensee. Canonical and TomTom hold associate membership status within the network. Keith Bergelt serves as the chief executive of the company. Prior to his role at OIN, Bergelt held the position of President and CEO of Paradox Capital, LLC As of November 2021, the membership of OIN comprised approximately 3,500 business licensees. The list of applications considered by OIN, according to Red Hat's Mark Webbink, includes

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

Evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...

, Fedora Directory Server,

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

GIMP Gimp or GIMP may refer to: Clothing * Bondage suit, also called a gimp suit, a type of suit used in BDSM * Bondage mask, also called a gimp mask, often worn in conjunction with a gimp suit Embroidery and crafts * Gimp (thread), an ornamental tr ...

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

, Mono,

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

Nautilus A nautilus (; ) is any of the various species within the cephalopod family Nautilidae. This is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and the suborder Nautilina. It comprises nine living species in two genera, the type genus, ty ...

, OpenLDAP, OpenOffice.org,

Open-Xchange Open-Xchange is an open source web-based office productivity software suite. History Founded in 2005 by Rafael Laguna and Frank Hoberg, the software was released in December of the same year, and started as a Linux-based email and groupware prog ...

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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, Python,

Samba Samba () is a broad term for many of the rhythms that compose the better known Brazilian music genres that originated in the Afro-Brazilians, Afro Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th century and early 20th century, It is a name or ...

, SELinux, Sendmail, and Thunderbird. There have been 10 updates, produced through a well-established process of carefully maintaining a balance between stability and adding innovative core open source technology, to the list of software components and packages covered by the Open Invention Network cross license. As of March 2022, more than 3,700 packages have been listed. On March 26, 2007,

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

licensed OIN's portfolio, thus agreeing not to assert patents against the Linux-based environment, including competitors

and

when used as part of a Linux system. Oracle exercised a Limitation Election on March 29, 2012. On August 7, 2007,

also joined OIN as a licensee. On October 2, 2007, Barracuda Networks joined OIN as a licensee. On March 23, 2009 TomTom joined OIN as a licensee. In May 2011, the European Open Source software manufacturer Univention joined OIN as a licensee. In early September 2009, Open Invention Network acquired 30 patents, from Allied Security Trust, another defensive patent management organization, that had been acquired from Microsoft through a private auction. If the patents had been acquired by patent trolls, they might have caused financial obstacles to Linux developers, distributors and users. OIN was able to avert this issue with the patent acquisition. On October 10, 2018,

joined the Open Invention Network community despite holding more than 60,000 patents. On November 19, 2019, Open Invention Network announced that it was teaming with IBM, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation to further protect Linux and open source from Patent Assertion Entities (PAE), commonly called Patent Trolls. Together, the organizations are funding a multi-million dollar, multi-year initiative with Unified Patents' Open Source Zone. This expands OIN’s and its partners’ patent non-aggression activities by deterring PAEs from targeting Linux and adjacent OSS technologies relied on by developers, distributors and users. Every 18 months to two years, Open Invention Network updates the list of software packages that it defines at its Linux System definition. In June 2024, Open Invention Network announced the 11th expansion of the definition, addressing more than 4,500 software packages and components. As of June 2024, OIN has grown its community to more than 3,800 business participants, a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 50%. On June 22, 2010, OIN announced an Associate Member program and the recruitment of Canonical (previously an OIN licensee) as its first associate member. The announcement drew criticism from anti-software-patent activist and a European lobbyist Florian Müller, who had previously criticized the OIN for a lack of transparency and for defining arbitrarily the scope of the patent protection it offers. Florian Mueller's credibility in attacking OIN has been called into question due to his paid relationship with corporate sponsors. On August 30, 2021, Xiaomi joined the Open Invention Network community.

Linux defenders

OIN encourages practices that eliminate low-quality patents—the foodstuff of aggressive strategics and patent trolls. Specifically, OIN encourages the Linux and open source communities to become active in: * Inter partes review is a procedure for challenging the validity of an issued patent owned by a third party. By challenging patents with IPRs, the Linux and broader open source community can help to eliminate them. Unified Patents has successfully invalidated a number of patents using Inter Partes Review. * Third-Party Preissuance Submissions provide for challenging the validity of a patent application. They provide a mechanism for third parties to submit

prior art Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria f ...

of potential relevance to the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency in the United States Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark ...

during the examination of another party’s patent application. In this way, the Linux and broader open source community can help to eliminate patents, and particularly help to mitigate the issuance of new low-quality patents. A patent application challenger may remain unnamed or anonymous by asking a firm to complete the Third-Party Preissuance Submission on its behalf. * Defensive publication, an

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...

strategy used to prevent another party from obtaining a patent. The strategy consists in disclosing an

enabling In psychotherapy and mental health, enabling is the encouragement of some behaviour, especially if said behaviour is either particularly positive or dysfunctional behavior, dysfunctional.

description and/or drawing of the product, apparatus, or method so that it enters the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

and becomes

. Many defensive publications can be searched for free in IP.com’s Prior Art Database.

References

External links

* * * {{cite web , last= Wheeler , first= David A. , date= Apr 14, 2006 , url= http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2006/04/14/#oin , title= Open Invention Network (OIN), software patents, and FLOSS Business services companies established in 2005 Free software companies Defensive patent aggregation companies of the United States 2005 establishments in North Carolina American companies established in 2005

History

Linux defenders

See also

References

External links