Red Hat Settles Hibernate Patent Dispute With Firestar/DataTern
I didn't pay attention to the following news item until today. After all, it is not unusual for Red Hat or other Linux companies to face intellectual property challenges. What I did not grasp is that this time, the dispute is not about Linux. It's about JBoss, and specifically, about Hibernate. You wouldn't have guessed it by reading the Red Hat press release:
Red Hat: Red Hat was sued for patent infringement by Firestar in 2006 and later by DataTern. Red Hat denied the infringement claims and in time drove a settlement that not only ended the particular claims against it, but also provided for extensive protections for its customers and the larger open source community that Red Hat relies upon.
However, a little googling showed more information about the suit:
Dennis Crouch, Patently-O: Software company FireStar has filed suit against open source seller Red Hat, alleging patent infringement. The suit, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, asserts infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,101,502 that is directed to a method of interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database. Red Hat recently purched JBoss maker of the specific accused product Hibernate 3.0.
and the settlement:
Dawn Kawamoto, C|Net: 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.
The patent involved, U.S. Patent No. 6,101,502, reads like common sense that shouldn't be allowed to be patented. However I'm not a lawyer, so I wouldn't know for sure.
However, the way I read the articles, if you are using Hibernate and you are not a Red Hat customer, or part of the larger open source community that Red Hat relies upon, you are still at risk of being sued by Firestar/DataTern, or whoever they sell this patent to in the future, for patent infringement.
Ouch!
Re: Red Hat Settles Hibernate Patent Dispute With Firestar/DataTern
About this patent infringement, I just took a look at the claims, I never saw anything so stupid as patenting "including the step of mapping a class attribute to a table column"; even filed in 1998, most of the claims are darn obvious to any OOP developer with one year exp or so!
I am really pissed off by this patent system in US. One day some guy will patent the way for human to walk on his 2 feet and thus will be able to sue every human being on earth (except babies and one-legged people)...
Fortunately the system in Europe is better, until they change it).
By the way, the "rice congee" is also called "chao" in Vietnam;-)