Nokia Opens Patented Technology To Open Source Community

In a move intended to provide intellectual property protections to the open source community, the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has asserted that its patented technology can be used in the open source operating system Linux. In doing so, Nokia joins other open source friendly companies, like Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, and encourages other parties to provide such protections to open source developers. However, Nokia excludes from this protection those companies that themselves make patent claims against the Linux kernels. Nokia’s legally binding statement only applies to existing patents, not to patents that may be issued in the future. Read more…