By Lucy Sherriff for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Patent licences will be made available to anyone, provided they
agree not to assert their own patent rights against either the
Linux OS, or certain Linux applications.
The company will be headed by Jerry Rosenthal, IBM's former VP
of intellectual property and licencing. He argues that open
collaboration is necessary to drive innovation and economic growth,
and that anything getting in the way of people collaborating on
Linux, impedes that innovation.
"A new model of intellectual property management for Linux must
be established to maintain advances in software
innovationregardless of the size or type of business
or organization," he added.
OIN, Rosenthal says, will not focus on income or profits, but on
freeing developers to write software without worrying about
intellectual property issues.
The launch has not been welcomed unconditionally, however.
"Such an alliance, even if it had a billion-dollar budget, could
only buy up a negligible portion of all software patents that the
USPTO and the European Patent Office crank out," argues
anti-software patent campaigner Florian Mueller.
To be "strategically relevant", the organisation would need to
be prepared to enter into cross-licencing agreements with companies
like Microsoft, in the event of a conflict, he says.
"The announcement talks about acquiring patents that are
relevant to Linux. For cross-licensing, it's key to acquire those
patents that your adversaries need for their own products. I really
hope they plan to do that."
So far the amount each company has invested has not been made
public.
© The Register
2005
