Open Invention Network
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| Open Invention Network | |
|---|---|
| Type | Limited liability company |
| Founded | November 10, 2005 |
| Headquarters | New York City, United States |
| Key people | Gerald Rosenthal |
| Industry | Intellectual property |
| Services | Licensing |
| Website | openinventionnetwork.com |
The Open Invention Network (OIN) is a company that acquires patents and licenses them royalty free to entities which, in turn, agree not to assert their own patents against Linux or Linux-related applications.[1]
Based in New York City, the company was founded on November 10, 2005 by IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. Gerald Rosenthal is the chief executive of the company. Rosenthal had previously worked at IBM, as vice president of Intellectual Property and Licensing. [2]
OIN holds the Commerce One Web services patents (previously acquired by Novell for $15.5 million), which cover several fundamentals of current business-to-business e-commerce practice. OIN's founders intend for these patents to encourage others to join, and to discourage legal threats against Linux and Linux-related applications.
The list of key applications considered by OIN, according to Red Hat's Mark H. Webbink, includes Apache, Eclipse, Evolution, Fedora Directory Server, Firefox, GIMP, GNOME, KDE, Mono, Mozilla, MySQL, Nautilus, OpenLDAP, OpenOffice.org, Open-Xchange, Perl, PostgreSQL, Python, Samba, SELinux, Sendmail, and Thunderbird.
On March 26, 2007, Oracle licensed OIN's portfolio, thus agreeing not to assert patents against the Linux environment, including competitors MySQL and PostgreSQL[3] when used as part of a Linux system. On August 7, 2007, Google also joined OIN as a licensee.[4] On October 2, 2007, Barracuda Networks joined OIN as a licensee.[5]
[edit] See also
- Patent Commons Project
- Patent pool
- Software patent
- Software patent debate
- Software patents and free software
- Open-source software
- Free software
[edit] References
- ^ Cover Pages web site, Open Invention Network Collects Patents to Promote Royalty-Free Linux, November 11, 2005.
- ^ Open Invention Network web site, Management Team. Consulted on May 16, 2007.
- ^ Stephen Shankland. "Oracle bands with open-source patent group", News.com, 2007-03-26. Retrieved on 2007-03-27.
- ^ InformationWeek, Google To Join Group To Protect Linux From Possible Patent Challenge, August 7, 2007
- ^ Matt Asay, Barracuda Networks: An unsung hero of open source and a new member of Open Invention Network, barracudanetworks.com, In the News, October 2, 2007.
[edit] External links
- Open Invention Network
- Gartner Research, OIN Will Promote Linux Innovation, but Raises Issues, November 16, 2005
- Webbink, Mark H. The Open Innovation Network. Linux Magazine, April 2006, page 18. Quoted in Open Invention Network (OIN), software patents, and FLOSS
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