12 June 2008, 11:59

Red Hat reaches a settlement in patent lawsuit

After nearly two years, the battle over a possible patent infringement by Red Hat related to the Hibernate persistence framework has ended in a settlement. The complainants, DataTern and Amphion Innovations, have granted the Linux distributor use rights to U.S. Patent Nr. 6,101,502. The patent describes methods of linking object oriented software to relational databases.

Hibernate is a component of the JBoss middleware suite (Jems). Red Hat acquired JBoss in spring of 2006. FireStar Software brought the case to court the same year. In the course of the court proceedings, FireStar transferred the patent to DataTern, which then pursued the complaint. Under the terms of the current settlement, DataTern has dropped an additional patent infringement claim against Red Hat also pertaining to relational database access from object oriented software.

The agreement is not only valid for Red Hat. Upstream and downstream developers – developers in the Fedora community distribution are in the latter category – as well as Red Hat customers are also protected.

(trk)

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