Open Invention Network

Open Invention Network (OIN) is a company that acquires patents and licenses them royalty-free to its community members who, in turn, agree not to assert their own patents against Linux and Linux-related systems and applications. History The company was incorporated on 31 October 2005. Based in Durham, NC, it was founded on November 10 by IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. NEC subsequently became a member. In December 2013, Google became a member. In July 2016, it was announced that Toyota became a member. On October 10, 2018, Erich Andersen announced that Microsoft joined as a licensee. Canonical and TomTom are associate members. Keith Bergelt is the chief executive of the company. Bergelt had previously served as President and CEO of Paradox Capital, LLC As of November, 2021 membership in the OIN stood at approximately 3,500 business licensees. The list of applications considered by OIN, according to Red Hat's Mark 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. 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.