patent suit

On July 15, Red Hat and Firestar released the terms of the settlement [PDF] of their patent suit.

When we last looked at this settlement, those terms were not available.

Now we can examine exactly what was agreed to and assess the degree of protection that Red Hat actually negotiated for the wider community.

It may be tempting to say that recent events have reduced the relevance of this settlement, but that would be a mistake; what Red Hat has done here still matters.

Red Hat has settled patent-infringement claims with Firestar Software and DataTern with an extension to cover its customers and the open-source community.

Two suits against Red Hat for the way its JBoss Hibernate product maps objects to a relational database have been settled before the case went to court.