Five Linux Companies Buy Software Patents

An anonymous reader writes "In order to protect themselves against patent grabbing 'trolls,' major Linux companies are buying software patents through a nonprofit company called Open Invention Network. This nonprofit company will then offer royalty-free licenses to companies and individuals that agreed not to assert their own patents."

The five companies are :-

[wongqc]

The five companies are :

1) International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)
2) Sony Corp
3) Philips Electronics NV
4) Novell Inc. (SUSE)
5) Red Hat Inc

I knew I recognised this

[myspys]

Fresh from yesterday/a [slashdot.org]

Gentlemen, start your engines

[gringer]

Okay, so the way to get modded up for comments to this post, is to pick a +5 comment from the following post, then give it a slightly different spin to account for the 23 hours passed since then:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/10/ 1321238&tid=136&tid=233&tid=106 [slashdot.org]

I guess it's not a complete dupe... the linked article for this post is different.

That Didn't Take Long

[campaign_bug]

The story [slashdot.org] the other day seemed to indicate they were just going to try to protect their customers from litigation. I read that as "providing legal backing" etc., as opposed to actually buying all the patents!

USTPO never wanted to grant software paten

[MECC]

The patent office never wanted to grant patents for software. They were forced to do so by the supreme court in the 1981 Diamond v. Diehr. [bitlaw.com][bitlaw.com]