Guest post by InformationWeek reports that Red Hat is being sued for patent infringement by Software Tree. The patent involved is of an impedance-matching layer between an object-oriented system and a relational database. “Red Hat acquired open source developer JBoss in 2006 for $420 million. Software Tree contends that certain of Red Hat’s JBoss products, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Hibernate, step on its patent. ‘The infringing products have no substantial noninfringing uses,’ Software Tree says in court papers. The lawsuit also names Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Genuitec as defendants because the companies sell JBoss-based software or include it on their products.” This is not the first time Red Hat has been sued over JBoss technology. A previous suit was the first public GPL compatible patent settlement and protected not only Red Hat but downstream users and developers as well.
Software Tree has had custome decline at a rapid rate for teh last 6 years, their software is absolute garbage as well, with rather infrequent updates. They don’t have the money to take this to court and drag it out, all Red Hat has to do is say “bring it on” and they will back down. As it is this is a fairly generig patent that a few software compnaies i can think of also infringe opon. the only reason to go after red hat directly is because the bigger companies that also possibly infringe, (oracle comes to mind), have a boat load of money and lawyers on retainer…
Well, so long as there are jurisdictions like Eastern, Texas around, this will continue to be a viable business model for companies that can’t otherwise compete.
Let’s check Groklaw, quick! I bet they already found a link between Software Tree and Microsoft.
You don’t need to, it was in the article.
“Software Tree’s partners include Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), IBM, Borland, and Sun, while customers range from Concert Communications to the Los Alamos National Lab and News Corporation’s Kesmai unit.”
Problem is, they don’t need money. Law firms in the US will take on cases for a contingency fee; as long as they have lawyers that think they’ll achieve some sort of payout that they can take a big chunk of, they don’t need much money to fund this.
They also have a similar case already in play with Oracle, who has much bigger guns than Red Hat does. Didn’t stop them.
Lawyers suck. Without them, I suspect that the legal system would be more just.
At least, until I need one.
Edited 2009-03-06 06:15 UTC