Posted Wednesday 8th August 2007 16:52 GMT
OIN
Basically what the OIN is is a group of companies and people who own patents and say that anybody can use these patents, so long as they agree not to use any patents they have themselves against open source.
It also means that we've got a bunch of big names standing together on the linux issue, against Microsoft and it's not at all unlikely that these companies will together clobber Microsoft legally, given the chance and the incentive to do so.