Open Invention Network
| Limited liability company | |
| Industry | Intellectual property |
| Founded | November 10, 2005 |
| Headquarters | Durham, NC, United States |
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Key people
|
Keith Bergelt |
| Services | Linux Protection |
| Website | www |
With more than 2,000 participants, Open Invention Network (OIN) is the largest patent non-aggression community in history and supports freedom of action in Linux as a key element of open source software. OIN acquires patents and licenses them royalty free to its community members which, in turn, agree not to assert their own patents against Linux and Linux-related systems and applications.
Based in Durham, NC, the company was founded on November 10, 2005 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. 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
Open Invention Network has more than 1,000 U.S. and international patents and patent applications. It 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. As of January 2016, OIN had more than 1,850 community members (licensees).
The list of key 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.
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