Open Invention Network

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The Open Invention Network (OIN) is a company that acquires patents and offer them royalty free "to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux operating system or certain Linux-related applications" (Press release of November 10, 2005 [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].

The list of key applications considered by OIN, according to Mark H. Webbink, includes Apache, Eclipse, Evolution, Fedora Directory Server, Firefox, GIMP, GNOME, KDE, Mono, Mozilla, MySQL, Nautilus, OpenLDAP, OpenOffice.org, Perl, PostgreSQL, Python, Samba, SELinux, Sendmail, and Thunderbird.

OIN has the Commerce One patents that cover web services, which potentially threaten anyone who uses web services. OIN's founders intend for these patents to encourage others to join, and to discourage legal threats against Linux and Linux-related applications.

[edit] See also

• Patent Commons Project
• Patent pool
• Software patent
• Software patent debate
• Open-source
• Open-source software
• Free software

[edit] External links

• Official site
• list of patents owned by OIN
• CNN Money, IBM, Sony, Philips form Linux alliance, November 10, 2005
• 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