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The Open Invention Network (OIN) is a Company that acquires Patent s and licenses them Royalty Free to entities which, in turn, agree not to assert their own patents against Linux or Linux-related applications. Cover Pages web site, ''Open Invention Network Collects Patents to Promote Royalty-Free Linux'' , November 11, 2005. Based in New York City , the company was founded on November 10 , 2005 by IBM , Novell , Philips , Red Hat , and Sony . Gerald Rosenthal is the chief executive of the company. Rosenthal had previously worked at IBM, as vice president of Intellectual Property and Licensing. Open Invention Network web site, ''Management Team'' . Consulted on May 16, 2007. OIN holds the Commerce One Web Services patents (previously acquired by Novell for $15.5 millon), which cover several fundamentals of current Business To Business E-commerce practice. OIN's founders intend for these patents to encourage others to join, and to discourage legal threats against Linux and Linux-related applications. The list of key applications considered by OIN, according to Red Hat's Mark H. Webbink, includes Apache , Eclipse , Evolution , Fedora Directory Server , Firefox , GIMP , GNOME , KDE , Mono , Mozilla , MySQL , Nautilus , OpenLDAP , OpenOffice.org , Open-Xchange , Perl , PostgreSQL , Python , Samba , SELinux , Sendmail , and Thunderbird . On March 26 , 2007 , Oracle licensed OIN's portfolio, thus agreeing not to assert patents against the Linux environment, including competitors MySQL and PostgreSQL 1 when used as part of a Linux system. On August 7 , 2007 , Google also joined OIN as a licensee. InformationWeek, ''Google To Join Group To Protect Linux From Possible Patent Challenge'' , August 7, 2007 SEE ALSO
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