Did Microsoft Really Just “Open Source All Its Patents”??
https://hackernoon.com/did-microsoft-really-just-open-source-all-its-patents-3e419ae1a439
This week, Microsoft announced its decision to join the Open Invention Network (‘OIN’) open-source patent consortium. Given Microsoft’s occasionally hostile relationship with open source, this announcement came as a surprise to many. Headlines and tweets proclaimed that Microsoft had “open sourced all its patents.”
Microsoft’s patent portfolio is one of the world’s largest and most valuable (reportedly, over 60,000 patents). Are all these patents now “open source?”