Leading open-source figures and companies[10] have complained that software patents are overly broad and the USPTO should reject most of them.
However, Mark Webbink, who was Red Hat's Deputy General Counsel, said that Ravicher did not deduce the kernel to infringe any of said patents.
Early drafts of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) contained several patent retaliation clauses that varied in scope, some of which were later removed due to concerns about their efficacy.
OIN's founders intend for these patents to encourage others to join, and to discourage legal threats against Linux and Linux-related applications.
[23] Microsoft has irrevocably pledged not to assert any claims against open source developers[24] which CEO Steve Ballmer called "an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies.
However, the 2009 lawsuit against TomTom involved the use of Microsoft's patents for long filenames on FAT filesystems, the code for which was in the Linux kernel, not in any TomTom-developed software.
[29] In 2011 a company called Bedrock Technologies LLC won a judgment of $5 million against Google for use of the Linux kernel, which the court found to violate US patent 5,893,120 (which was filed in 1997 and issued in 1999, and covers techniques for software caches likely used in every modern operating system).
In January 2008, Trend Micro accused Barracuda Networks of patent infringement for distribution of the ClamAV anti-virus software.
In October 2007, IP Innovation LLC, a company specialized in patent-protection, filed a suit for patent infringement against Red Hat and Novell.
[48] In December 2007, Microsoft granted the Samba project access to certain proprietary documents and must maintain a list of related patents for a one-time fee of 10,000 Euros.
[49] Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24, 2004 Decision pertaining to antitrust violations.