Guest post by “Facebook, HP, Rackspace, Juniper, Fujitsu and dozens of other organizations have joined a group building a defensive patent portfolio to protect Linux-using members from potential lawsuits. […] Seeking to boost membership, the patent group said Wednesday it has added 74 new licensees in the first quarter of this year, bringing its total number of corporate supporters to 334.”
Department of Justice says Novell and CPTN must change patent deal
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Department-of-Justice-says-N…
“The US Department of Justice has announced that for the Novell/CPTN patent deal to go ahead, it is requiring major changes to the deal because as originally proposed, “the deal would jeopardize the ability of open source software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete.”
Essentially it appears as though the DOJ are making the conditions of the CPTN deal conform to Novell’s agreements, as a member of the OIN, to other members and licensees of the OIN.
“The DoJ, working closely with Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, appears to have agreed with the OSI and FSF’s view of the deal, and is requiring major changes. Most importantly for open source developers, the agreement now says that all of the Novell patents will be “acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux system”.”
This means, as far as I can tell, that all of the members of the OIN, including the new joiners in Facebook, HP, Rackspace, Juniper, Fujitsu and dozens of other organizations, cannot be threatened by Novell’s patents.
Edited 2011-04-21 03:12 UTC
Niche operating systems without a defensive patent portfolio. Do they in some why rely on being marginal for the sake of not reaching a competitor threat level?
Your question is vague but what OIN calls “Linux” is a set of several hundreds of open components and not limited to the Linux kernel.
Indeed, OIN calls this set of components a “Linux System”, and not just Linux.