Early last week brought the world the surprising announcement that Microsoft would be joining the Open Invention Network (OIN), a community of some 2,650 companies worldwide that has agreed to cross-license their respective patents for all other network members.
Historically Microsoft has not been a friend to the open source community, especially concerning the rival operating system Linux. Microsoft’s conversion did not happen out of the blue, although it did happen fast.
Erich Andersen, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft, describes the move as “the next logical step for a company that is listening to customers and developers”. In the last couple of years, with the reorientation towards platform-based cloud-service, Microsoft has been cozying up to the open source community, needing to be on good standing in order to attract them to their platform. In fact, Microsoft is bringing their entire portfolio of roughly 60,000 active patents to the table with 30,000 more pending. making the OIN that much more attractive for potential future members. This is a big and promising step towards the ideal of a cooperative business environment aimed at innovating together instead of obstructing each other with legal battles. Hopefully the traction the open source community has been gaining will help cultivate a similar culture outside of the tech realm as well in the broader business world.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-joins-open-invention-network-to-help-protect-linux-and-open-source/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-open-sources-its-entire-patent-portfolio/
