Red Hat settles patent suit with Firestar, DataTern

Red Hat announced on Wednesday that it has reached a settlement with Firestar Software and DataTern over a patent infringement lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed two years ago in a U.S. District Court in Texas, centered on Firestar's patent for linking object-oriented software with relational databases.

Firestar, in its lawsuit, had alleged that JBoss, which Red Hat had acquired, violated its patent with the JBoss Hibernate 3.0 object-relational mapping tool for Java. Hibernate 3.0 had an open license.

Under the settlement, whose financial terms were not disclosed, all software distributed under Red Hat's brands and predecessor versions are covered, as well as Red Hat customers that use the software. The software protects derivative works, or combination products, that use covered products from the patent claim.

"Typically, when a company settles a patent lawsuit, it focuses on getting safety for itself," Rob Tiller, Red Hat's assistant general counsel of intellectual property, said in a statement. "But that was not enough for us; we wanted broad provisions that covered our customers."

DataTern became involved in the lawsuit after Firestar assigned the patent to DataTern.

[ewriter21]

So Red Hat got protection for their commercial offering and for upstream developers as long as their work shows up in a Red Hat product but not other commercial products? Isn't this what Novell and Microsoft did? Didn't Red Hat spend extraordinary effort to paint Novell as the most evil thing ever to happen to Open Source for having done so? Am I missing something or, despite carefully crafted words to create the illusion otherwise, has Red Hat just become a giant hypocrite?

[linuxfiend]

I am continually amazed by the asinine patents companies manage to get through Patent and Trademark Office. Linking object-oriented software to relational databases is neither novel or non-obvious. I don't think the USPTO even reads the applications before they approve them.

[Thomas, David]

I totally agree with a previous poster, this should never have been patentable on the first place. Copyrighted of course! It goes to show the lack of knowledge employed in the USPTO.

[airdrik]

The difference between these patent lawsuits and the Microsoft threats is that these are real, identifiable patents, which apparently those companies do own and such can be proven. Whereas, with the M$ threats there haven't been any patents specifically identified which RedHat or Linux or Open Source violates.
Red Hat is showing that while they aren't going to bow down to threats, they are going to defend their customers and the open source community from real problems.

I look at this and think "Hurray for Red Hat for defending the open source community." Especially since it appears that any fines/dues will be handled entirely by Red Hat so that their customers and the open source community may continue to use the products as though there were no litigation.

[benjaminstraight]

A legal technicality yet serves a purpose in setting precedent.