Kudos! Microsoft Open-Sources Patent Portfolio by Steven J Vaughan-Nichols.
From the post:
Several years ago, I said the one thing Microsoft has to do — to convince everyone in open source that it’s truly an open-source supporter — is stop using its patents against Android vendors. Now, it’s joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), an open-source patent consortium. Microsoft has essentially agreed to grant a royalty-free and unrestricted license to its entire patent portfolio to all other OIN members.
Before Microsoft joined, OIN had more than 2,650 community members and owns more than 1,300 global patents and applications. OIN is the largest patent non-aggression community in history and represents a core set of open-source intellectual-property values. Its members include Google, IBM, Red Hat, and SUSE. The OIN patent license and member cross-licenses are available royalty-free to anyone who joins the OIN community.
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In a conversation, Erich Andersen, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and chief intellectual property (IP) counsel — that is, Microsoft top patent person — added: We “pledge our entire patent portfolio to the Linux system. That’s not just the Linux kernel, but other packages built on it.”
This is huge
How many patents does this affect? Andersen said Microsoft is bringing 60,000 patents to OIN.
(emphasis in original)
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If approximately 1,300 patents attracted members to Open Invention Network (OIN), imagine the attractive force exerted by an additional 60,000!
Suggestion: None of us are who we were yesterday, much less ten or twenty years ago. Let’s take these new facts on the patent landscape and move forward.
Discussions of “could have, should have, what if had, etc.,” are non-contributions to building a new tomorrow.