Red Hat�s Secret Patent Deal and the Fate of JBoss Developers
Nov 12, 2010, 20:35 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Bruce Perens)
"When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a
bang: Acacia's patents were invalidated by the court, and all
software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to
cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat's next tangle with
Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep
it that way? Could the outcome have placed Red Hat in violation of
the open-source licenses on its own product?
"The suit in question — Software Tree LLC v. Red Hat, Inc.
– claimed that JBoss, the well-known Java web software,
infringed upon U.S. Patent No. 6163776 (PDF), which essentially
claims invention of the object-relational database paradigm. In
that paradigm, an object in an object-oriented software language
represents a database record, and the attributes of the object
represent fields in the database, making it possible for
programmers to access a database without writing any SQL. It's a
common element in most web programming environments today."
Complete Story
Related Stories:
- Microsoft, Motorola Patent Battle: A Lose-Lose-Lose Proposition(Oct 06, 2010)
- Red Hat settles patent case with Acacia - shares few details(Oct 05, 2010)
- Standing up to a patent bully
(May 12, 2010)
- Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit(May 03, 2010)
- Red Hat & Novell Beat IP Innovation and in Marshall, Texas, too(May 01, 2010)
- Acacia Denies Patent Claim is an Attack on Open Source, Denies Any Microsoft Role(Oct 22, 2007)
