The Chinese company Baidu one of the world's largest Internet search engines and services that has the “Baidu” search engine ranking sixth in Alexa ranking and products related to artificial intelligence, has been included in the Open Invention Network organization (OIN), which protects the Linux ecosystem from patent claims.
Baidu has joined as a member of the community y as an active advocate of open source and a major contributor to global open source technology, thereby Baidu is committed to promoting the rapid development of AI through an open source platform and facilitate industrial transformation.
For those who are unfamiliar with the OIN, you should know that this is an organization in which its members agree not to file patent claims and are free to use patented technologies in projects related to the Linux ecosystem.
You have to remember that it was the Open Invention Network (OIN) joined the defense of the patent claims in the Gnome-Rothschild Patent Imaging case. To which the OIN assembled a team of lawyers to invalidate the patent and launched an initiative to find facts about the prior use of the technologies described in the patent.
Baidu owns a significant number of patents in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning and Internet technologies.
Members of OIN include more than 3,200 companies, communities and organizationss that they have signed a license agreement to share patents.
Among the key OIN contributors to the patent pool that Linux advocates are companies such as Google, IBM, NEC, Toyota, Renault, SUSE, Philips, Red Hat, Alibaba, HP, AT&T, Juniper, Facebook, Cisco, Casio, Huawei, Fujitsu Sony and Microsoft.
Companies that sign the agreement get access to OIN patents, in exchange for the obligation not to file legal claims for the use of technologies used in the Linux ecosystem.
In particular, as part of joining OIN, Microsoft transferred to OIN members the right to use more than 60 thousand of its patents, pledging not to use them against Linux and open source software.
The agreement between OIN members applies only to distribution components that fall within the definition of the Linux system ("Linux System").
"Baidu is and always will be a great advocate and participant in open source," said Cui Lingling, head of Baidu's Patent Department. "
"Baidu has launched a number of open source platforms including Apollo (Autonomous Driving Platform), PaddlePaddle (Parallel Distributed Deep Learning) and the like, and has been actively developing patent cooperation."
Currently the list includes 2873 packagesincluding Linux kernel, Android platform, KVM, Git, nginx, CMake, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Lua, OpenJDK, WebKit, KDE, GNOME, QEMU, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt, systemd, X.Org , Wayland, etc.
In addition to non-aggression obligations for additional protection, a group of patents has been formed within the OIN, including patents Linux related bought or donated by the participants.
OIN's patent pool includes more than 1300 patents. In the hands of OIN is included a group of patents, which presented one of the first references to technologies for creating dynamic web content, anticipating the appearance of systems such as Microsoft's ASP, Sun / Oracle's JSP and PHP.
Another significant contribution was the acquisition in 2009 of 22 Microsoft patents, which had previously been sold to the AST consortium, as patents affecting "open source" products.
All OIN members are free to use these patents. The validity of the OIN agreement was confirmed by a decision of the United States Department of Justice, which required that the interests of OIN be considered in the terms of the transaction for the sale of Novell's patents.
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