Amazon Joins the Open Invention Network

We’re excited to announce that Amazon has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), a patent non-aggression community formed to safeguard essential open source technologies such as Linux and adjacent technologies.

Amazon Web Services has long benefited from the innovation arising out of the open source community. Today Amazon is committing its entire patent portfolio to the body of patents that are free to use with OIN’s defined open source projects. Once the OIN agrees to protect a piece of software, all members are granted royalty-free, community patent licenses for the use of that software. By adding our patents to the pool, we are helping to reduce the risk of patent aggression for companies that innovate with open source.

Our membership is also a statement that AWS is committed to protecting and fostering open source. All OIN members promise that they won’t use their patents against each other with respect to open source software covered under the umbrella of OIN. OIN protects essential open source technologies included under their Linux System definition. To date, the list includes 3,730 software packages covered by the OIN community license.

“Linux and open source are essential to many of our customers and a key driver of innovation across AWS. We are proud to support a broad range of open source projects, foundations, and partners, and we are committed to the long-term success and sustainability of open source as a whole,” said Nithya Ruff, director, Open Source Program Office at Amazon. “By joining OIN, we are continuing to strengthen open source communities and helping to ensure technologies like Linux remain thriving and accessible to everyone.”

AWS is investing heavily in open source communities to ensure the sustainability of the open source ecosystem as a whole. Our open source investments include hiring dedicated developers and maintainers to work on upstream projects and fine tuning performance of open source projects to run in the cloud. We also provide funding and cloud credits to open source foundations, and sponsor events and other community initiatives. For example, in May we announced $10 million in funding over three years for the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). And in November we pledged $3 million in cloud credits and dedicated engineering resources to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to fund infrastructure improvements for Kubernetes.

We look forward to working with OIN, its members, and the broader open source community to further protect Linux and other foundational open source technologies.