Microsoft donates 60,000 patents to open source as it joins Open Invention Network

What a difference a decade makes

Microsoft is to donate 60,000 patents to open source after announcing plans to join the Open Invention Network, a ‘patent non-aggression pact' that counts IBM, Novell and Red Hat among its founding members.

Such a move would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but today Microsoft is increasingly focused on cloud computing services, while its customers are also reliant on Linux and open-source technologies - hence Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of code repository GitHub.

The donation encompasses almost all of Microsoft's patent portfolio, with the exception of a number of patents relating to Windows and desktop applications.

"We know Microsoft's decision to join the Open Invention Network may be viewed as surprising to some; it is no secret that there has been friction in the past between Microsoft and the open source community over the issue of patents," said Erich Andersen, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft.

"For others who have followed our evolution, we hope this announcement will be viewed as the next logical step for a company that is listening to customers and developers and is firmly committed to Linux and other open source programs.

"At Microsoft, we take it as a given that developers do not want a binary choice between Windows versus Linux, or .NET versus Java - they want cloud platforms to support all technologies."

Andersen explicitly pitched the donation as a move that will help to protect Linux.

"Now, as we join Open Invention Network, we believe Microsoft will be able to do more than ever to help protect Linux and other important open source workloads from patent assertions. We bring a valuable and deep portfolio of over 60,000 issued patents to Open Invention Network," Andersen added.

"We also hope that our decision to join will attract many other companies to Open Invention Network, making the licence network even stronger for the benefit of the open source community."

Aspects of Azure, .NET, Active Server Pages (ASP) and several other technologies either are or were open sourced already. Earlier this month, the company also released MS-DOS as a learning tool.

The move is a far cry from the bellicose attitude of former CEO Steve Ballmer to open source, and Linux in particular.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in 2001 (now no longer available), Ballmer described Linux as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". Five years later he was also hinting at formal legal action against Linux distributors - action that would deploy Microsoft's arsenal of intellectual property to either bludgeon them out of existence or to persuade them to pay royalties.

The Open Invention Network, meanwhile, has grown from a handful of founding members in 2005 to more than 2,650 members today.

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