Open Invention Network

The Open Invention Network ( OIN ) is an industry consortium that acquires software patents and that every company and every private person is freely available, which agree to any claims against the free and open source operating system GNU / Linux, or against any other software which communicates with Linux in connection to assert.

The consortium was Hat on 10 November 2005 by IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony founded in New York City. The managing director, Gerald Rosenthal, was formerly served as Vice President of Intellectual Property and Licensing at IBM.

On 26 March 2007, Oracle joined the OIN. On 7 August 2007, Google Inc. also joined the OIN. Since December 2010 are also the The Document Foundation and KDE project with it as well since early May 2011, the European open source software vendor Univention.