Linux Community Magazine: Dec 9, 2010

Red Hat's Secret Patent Deal and the Fate of JBoss Developers

Red Hat?s Secret Patent Deal and the Fate of JBoss Developers
Nov 12, 2010, 20 :35 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (926 reads)
(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."

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