Open Invention Network

Open Invention Network
Company type	Private
Industry	Intellectual property
Founded	October 31, 2005; 21 years ago
Headquarters	Durham, United States
Key people	Keith Bergelt (CEO)
Products	Patent acquisition and royalty-free licensing for Linux and related technologies

Open Invention Network (OIN) is a firm specializing in intellectual property rights, headquartered in Durham, United States. It focuses on acquiring patents and providing royalty-free licensing to its members, who commit to refraining from enforcing their patents against Linux and related technologies under OIN's licensing framework.

History

Established on 31 October 2005, OIN is based in Durham, NC. Its founding participants included IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. Subsequent additions to the network comprised NEC, Google (December 2013), Toyota (July 2016), and Microsoft (October 2018). Associate members feature companies such as Canonical and TomTom. The organization is led by Keith Bergelt, formerly CEO of Paradox Capital. By November 2021, the network encompassed approximately 3,500 corporate licensees.

The scope of OIN’s cross-licensing agreements covers significant open source software projects including Apache, Eclipse, Fedora Directory Server, Firefox, GNOME, KDE, MySQL, OpenOffice.org, PostgreSQL, and the Python language, among others. Since its inception, over ten expansions have increased the portfolio to more than 3,700 software packages as of March 2022.

Prominent collaborations include Oracle’s patent licensing deal in March 2007, Google joining as a licensee in August 2007, and Barracuda Networks entering in October 2007. Additional members such as TomTom joined in March 2009, with Univention Corporate Server following in May 2011. In an effort to mitigate litigation risks for Linux developers, OIN acquired a portfolio of 30 patents from Allied Security Trust—originally held by Microsoft—in September 2009.

Despite possessing a patent portfolio exceeding 60,000 patents, Microsoft became an OIN member in October 2018. In November 2019, OIN collaborated with IBM, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation to launch a multi-year program aimed at combating patent assertion entities that threaten Linux and open source innovations.

OIN revises its Linux System definition every 18 to 24 months. The most recent update in June 2024 expanded coverage to over 4,500 software packages. The community has grown beyond 3,800 corporate participants with an annual growth rate surpassing 50%.

In June 2010, OIN introduced its Associate Member program, naming Canonical as its inaugural associate member. This initiative attracted some criticism concerning transparency and the extent of patent protection offered.

In August 2021, Xiaomi became part of the OIN community.

Linux defenders

OIN advocates for the elimination of low-quality patents that often underpin aggressive patent strategies and support patent trolls. It encourages active participation from the Linux and open source communities through several mechanisms:

Engaging in Inter partes review, a procedure designed to contest the validity of granted patents. This process has been effective in invalidating problematic patents; for example, Unified Patents has successfully challenged multiple claims via IPR.
Utilizing Third-Party Preissuance Submissions, which permit external parties to present prior art during patent examination at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This approach helps prevent the issuance of weak patents while allowing challengers to maintain anonymity through intermediaries.
Employing Defensive publication as an intellectual property tactic that publicly discloses enabling information or illustrations to place inventions into the public domain as prior art. This strategy prevents others from obtaining patents on those inventions. Numerous such publications are accessible through IP.com’s Prior Art Database.

External links

History

Linux defenders

See also

External links