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Linux Vendor Red Hat Settles Patent Suits, Says It's Protecting the Open Source Community
Red Hat has settled patent suits with Firestar Software, Inc., Amphion, and Datatern on a patent covering the Object-Relational Database Model, which those companies asserted was used in the jBoss Hibernate package - not in Red Hat Linux.
The covered products include all software distributed under Red Hat's brands, as well as upstream predecessor versions. The settlement also protects derivative works of, or combination products using, the covered products from any patent claim based in any respect on the covered products. Essentially, all that have innovated to create, or that will innovate with, software distributed under Red Hat brands are protected, as are Red Hat customers.
This is very different from patent agreements made by Novell and other Linux distributions with Microsoft, which protect their own customers exclusively, excluding the Open Source community that develops their software.
Full terms of the settlement and patent licenses are not yet available.
Richard Fontana, patent attorney for Red Hat and formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center, said
Red Hat's settlement satisfies the most stringent patent provisions in open source licenses, is consistent with the letter and spirit of all versions of the GPL and provides patent safety for developers, distributors and users of open source software.
Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, said
If we can judge from Red Hat's statement, the deal is good for the free software community. I would not want to treat that as certain; they might have chosen not to mention some negative side. Be that as it may, it was an unfortunate mistake to refer to patents as "intellectual property"; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html. Red Hat should know better than to do that.
Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center, and general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, said
"Red Hat's settlement of outstanding patent litigation on terms that provide additional protection to other members of the community upstream and downstream from Red Hat is a positive contribution to the resources for community patent defense. We would hope to see more settlements of this kind--in which parties secure more than their own particular legal advantage in relation to the third-party patent risk of the whole FOSS community--when commercial redistributors of FOSS choose to settle patent litigation. SFLC welcomes Red Hat's efforts on the community's behalf."
Red Hat further discusses the settlement on their web site. Red Hat still faces a suit by IP Innovation LLC, a "patent troll" company staffed with ex-Microsoft executives.