Red Hat Settles Patent Suit for Open-Source Community

June 11th, 2008 · No Comments

Linux vendor Red Hat announced Wednesday that it has settled patent-infringement claims filed against it by two companies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based company said the settlement with Firestar Software and DataTern “protects Red Hat’s customers and the open-source community” from similar suits, as well as setting a precedent “in the breadth of protection for the open-source community.”

Covers Customers and Community

Rob Tiller, vice president and assistant general counsel at Red Hat, added that a patent settlement usually involves a company “getting safety for itself,” but his company wanted broad provisions to cover its customers and the open-source community.

In 2006, Firestar sued Red Hat in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas. The lawsuit contended that Hibernate, a JBoss product, infringed its patent related to a method for interfacing an object-oriented software application with a relational database. JBoss is owned by Red Hat, and Red Hat denied the claims.

As the lawsuit proceeded, Red Hat said that its products had not infringed the patent and that, at any rate, the patent was invalid. At one point, the patent was assigned by Firestar to DataTern, which became a party to the suit.

Firestar products include EdgeNode, a platform for managing business processes between companies. DataTern’s products include a data-services runtime engine called ObjectSpark that controls data between the logical processing layer in an application and the data sources.

The products covered in the settlement include all software distributed under the Red Hat brands, in addition to predecessor versions, derivative works, and combined products.

Another Patent Suit

Software patents in general have been the source of more than a little controversy in the software industry. Red Hat said its position has been that software patents impede innovation and conflict with open-source development and distribution.

Red Hat is not out of the patent-litigation woods yet. It is…

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