Linux Solutions

A company that ensures the Linux community is safe from intellectual property litigation by buying up patents, will soon launch a website to help inventors file defensive publications – that’s documents that make details of an invention public, thus preventing others from later making patent claims on it..

“The more we can mobilize this community, the fewer patents that will actually be granted,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN). “Whatever happens in the patent reform world in the next [U.S.] administration is great, but we have to act now to stop the granting of patents that threaten Linux and open-source in general.”

OIN will reveal more details about the site over the coming weeks. Bergelt described it as “a production environment where we educate and train people to do this. We’ll work with them to make sure it’s put in a form that is acceptable.”

With backing from Google, Sony, Novell, IBM, Philips, Red Hat, NEC, Alfresco and Oracle among the licensees, the effort will serve as a counterpart to OIN’s existing strategy, where it provides royalty free patents to companies in exchange for a commitment that they won’t assert their patents against the Linux system.

OIN generally acquires patents tied to areas like virtualisation and networking. “Those are kind of the key areas to Linux as it moves forward,” Bergelt said.

He did not reveal quite how much money OIN has on hand but said that it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that the organisation will “continue to buy at a brisk pace.”