Mageia joins Open Invention Network

Mageia.org has just joined Open Invention Network as a licensee.

Software patents are a threat to Free Open Source Software development and to free innovation at large.

OIN‘s goal is to minimize/eliminate software patent threats within the Linux ecosystem. It helps by insuring confidence, free innovation and growth within the Linux stack by taking a collaborative and defensive stance against software patents.

OIN provides its members and licensees with the means to:

• Cross-license to each other, at no cost, their patents relative to Linux;
• Benefit from OIN-owned pool of patents,
• Gather forces and defend against software patent threats.

While this doesn’t resolve the question of software patents, it is a great help to defend against those sorts of threats. Mageia.Org strives to understand, design, experiment and release software to empower people in their daily lives; software patents are not going to help in this regard. So we welcome OIN and any other initiative that may help reducing software patents impact and abuses.

OIN members include Sony, IBM, NEC, Red Hat, Philips, Novell. OIN licensees include Canonical, Fluendo, GNOME, Google, KDE, Mozilla, OpenMoko, Oracle, Tom Tom, and many others.

Note that OIN is not alone, only relates to the Linux system and is not the only way to silence software patents, where they are effectively valid; see:

• EFF Patent Busting project
• Patent Commons
• NoSoftwarePatents.com
• Groklaw extensive resources on the topic
• KDE officially joined OIN