TIER IV put Autoware under Open Invention Network 2.0 patent non-aggression

TIER IV said on August 21 that it had joined Open Invention Network 2.0, the widened version of the patent non-aggression community that the network launched in January 2026. The Tokyo company has led development of Autoware, the open-source autonomous driving stack, since its first release in 2015.

Members of the network grant one another royalty-free cross-licenses covering patents that read on a defined set of open-source software. The 2.0 arrangement extends that definition beyond the original Linux boundary. Autoware is built on Linux and the Robot Operating System, so both sit inside the covered scope.

TIER IV framed the move as removing a legal obstacle rather than changing its own intellectual-property position, saying it wanted carmakers, suppliers and semiconductor companies to be able to adopt Autoware without taking on patent litigation risk. The company did not disclose how many patents of its own fall within the commitment.

The step follows a run of platform agreements from the same company this month. TIER IV said on August 20 that it would put Autoware and its reference driving models onto Renesas R-Car Gen 5 chips, and earlier in August it licensed its Co-MLOps architecture to Astemo. Each of those puts the stack somewhere new; this one addresses whether a buyer’s lawyers will sign off on it once it is there.