Huawei has become a licensee member of the Open Invention Network (OIN), agreeing to cross-license Linux patents to one another royalty free and to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux.
Huawei is a long-term member of the Linux Foundation and other open source organizations, including the OpenStack Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
In October last year, Huawei became a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation.
Huawei's trade sanctions and licensing issues with Google are reasons why the company has embraced open source further.
The political pressure on Huawei has given the company's leadership "a very strong sense of its positioning and its responsibility. It not only has to be a good citizen of the community that it's part of in open source, but it has to be a model citizen, The Register quoted OIN CEO Keith Bergelt as saying.
Bergelt mentioned that he hopes that more Chinese companies will join OIN, such as ZTE, China Telecom and China Mobile.
OIN is the largest patent protection community in history and supports the free development environment of Linux, a key element of open source software (OSS).
The core technology patent protection is the cultural norm within OSS, so only by joining the OIN community can we know whether the behavior in the community is honest or not.
OIN was founded with the strong support of industry companies such as Google, IBM, NEC, Philips, Sony, SUSE and Toyota. It has more than 3,200 members and more than 1,300 global patents and applications.
OIN patent license and member's patent cross-licensing are free for all OIN community members.
