OIN announces 70 new licensees

The Open Invention Network, a patent licensing group created to defend the Linux ecosystem, has announced that seventy companies have signed on as licensees in the first quarter of this year, expanding its licensee community by 28%. According to the OIN, it now has a total of 334 corporate supporters.

There are a number of big names in the new intake such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Fujitsu, Symantec and Facebook, as well as companies and organisations well known in the open source community, such as Mandriva, Nexenta, Open Stack, Clonezilla and gNewSense,

The OIN was created in 2005 by IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony as a defensive measure to prevent patent aggression against the Linux ecosystem. Recent licencees include The Document Foundation, Mozilla and Canonical, which became the organisations first Associate Member in 2010.

OIN holds a portfolio of patents, held by the organisation or its nominees, which are available royalty-free to any organisation which agrees not to use in legal action against the Linux System under the terms of the OIN Licence Agreement. The OIN defines the Linux System any components under an open source licence (or in the public domain) which is distributed for use with the Linux kernel.

See also:

• The Open Invention Network launches Associate Member programme, a report from The H.
  
• Patently Opaque, a feature from The H looking at the OIN's involvement in a 2009 purchase of Microsoft patents.
• Open Invention Network starts buying patents, a report from The H.

(djwm)