Google Partners With OIN For Linux

lymeca writes "Groklaw reports that Google has become the Open Invention Network's first end-user licensee. The OIN was established by companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and somewhat ironically Novell to accumulate patents and license them royalty-free to any company promising not to leverage their own patent portfolio against key applications available on GNU/Linux, including many GNU projects as well as Linux itself. Google's support bolsters the OIN's effectiveness as a shield against patent attacks against GNU/Linux and many popular applications that run on it."

Comments

Re:So what happens when someone buys Google?

[mhall119]

Google licensed OIN patents, it didn't (in this article) contribute any of it's own patents to OIN. Basically what this move does is gives Google the ability to use these patents from IBM, Novell and Red Hat in it's own products. It also (and more importantly) means that Google would lose that ability if it ever decided to sue Linux or any part of what OIN defines as a "Linux System". Since nobody was every really concerned about Google doing that, this is more of a PR move to bolster both Google's standing in the FOSS community, and to give corporate legitimacy to the OIN, which will hopefully spur other, possibly smaller, companies into licensing OIN patents as well, maybe even contributing some of it's own patents. OIN is to patents what FOSS is to copyright.