Microsoft Corp.’s latest gesture to the open-source community could prove to be one of its most significant so far.

The company today announced that it’s joining the Open Invention Network, an industry consortium dedicated to shielding its more than 2,600 member firms from patent litigation. The move will see Microsoft make its portfolio of 60,000-plus patents available royalty-free to the other organizations in the group.

OIN’s shared intellectual property pool provides protection against lawsuits that involve open-source software. This legal coverage extends to what the group refers to the “Linux System,” which encompasses the Linux kernel, many of the tools available for the operating system and large parts of Android.

It’s the inclusion of the latter system that makes Microsoft’s decision to join so notable. In 2013, financial services firm Nomura Holdings Inc. estimated that the technology giant was collecting $2 billion worth of patent royalties per year from Android handset makers. Most of those companies, including market leader Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Android creator Google LLC itself, are OIN members.

Microsoft’s entry into the group will likely significantly reduce and potentially outright eliminate the earlier royalty requirements. Microsoft has struck cross-licensing agreements with several of the major players in the Android ecosystem since Nomura’s 2013 report, though the scope of the deals was never disclosed.

For Microsoft, whatever revenue it will relinquish with today’s move is evidently worth the boost to its standing in the open-source community. The company has enthusiastically embraced projects such as Linux under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and released the code for quite a few technologies of its own. One of the latest additions to the roster is a homegrown machine learning engine called Infer.NET. 

Today’s announcement comes less than a week after Microsoft signed up for the LOT Network, an industry group focused on combating so-called patent trolls. Earlier, it launched a program called Azure IP Advantage to defend cloud customers from patent lawsuits involving open-source software.

“We know Microsoft’s decision to join OIN may be viewed as surprising to some; it is no secret that there has been friction in the past between Microsoft and the open source community over the issue of patents,” Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a blog post, alluding to the company’s once combative relationship with the Linux ecosystem. 

“For others who have followed our evolution, we hope this announcement will be viewed as the next logical step for a company that is listening to customers and developers and is firmly committed to Linux and other open source programs,” Andersen continued.

Photo: Microsoft