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Today Red Hat announced the settlement of patent litigation involving Firestar Software, Inc. and DataTern, Inc. Below is a detailed FAQ with additional information about today’s news.
The lawsuit was originally filed by Firestar Software, Inc. (“Firestar”) in 2006 in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas (Civil Action No. 2-06CV-258). It alleged violation of U.S. Patent No. 6,101,502 (“’502 patent”), which relates to a method for interfacing an object-oriented software application with a relational database to facilitate access to the relational database. Firestar contended that Hibernate, a JBoss product, infringed the ‘502 patent. Red Hat denied that allegation and vigorously contested the claim.
Red Hat defended on the basis that its products had not infringed the patent and that the patent was invalid. The parties exchanged information and numerous documents in discovery. Issues related to construction of the patent claims were briefed and an argument before the federal court was scheduled. The ‘502 patent was assigned by Firestar to DataTern, Inc. (“DataTern”), which thereafter became involved in the lawsuit. Shortly before the argument, the parties agreed on settlement terms.
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Red Hat was disappointed but hardly surprised that the single-vendor, monopolist-promulgated standard, Office Open XML, made it though an unfortunately flawed fast-track ISO approval process. We also note that there remains an ongoing investigation by the European competition authorities into the practices employed in the process.
So, if you define interoperability as single vendor’s format to promote operation with that same vendor’s dominant product, you can declare victory. But Red Hat thinks governments and enterprises are not so easily confused. The Open Document Format, which has long been a multiparty-supported ISO standard, will continue to be a force in procurement decisions to be reckoned with. Government and Enterprises are tired of the lack of choice, lack of innovation, and premium rents from vendor lock-in. We doubt anyone will be confused by this outcome.
We want to congratulate the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, and the many companies and individuals, who have all worked so diligently, for their efforts in developing version 3 of the GNU General Public License. Their work is to be commended. Red Hat believes our end user customers will benefit from several of the new provisions in GPLv3, including the patent license provisions. Red Hat will continue to contribute to projects that migrate from GPLv2 or other licenses to GPLv3, and we will look to include GPLv3-licensed projects in our future distributions. GPLv3 will also be added to the list of approved open source licenses under Red Hat’s Patent Promise.
Red Hat is a proud sponsor of and contributor to the pilot program of the Peer-to-Patent project, which launched June 15, 2007. This project, developed by New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy with the cooperation of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), will test an approach for enabling the public to participate in the patent-examination process. While this pilot will have limited scope—one year, 250 software patents—we hope that the data we gather will demonstrate the value of public inclusion in the patent-examination process, enabling the PTO to someday extend it to all filed patent applications.
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Red Hat has led and continues to lead the open source industry in promoting innovation and making free and open source software easier to consume. This includes providing our clients with the most comprehensive open source intellectual property protections through our Open Source Assurance program. Our confidence in our technology and protections for customers remains strong and has not wavered.
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