FireStar
Software has filed a claim against Linux vendor
Red Hat
for an alleged patent infringement in one of its software products.
The disputed patent describes a model for 'employing a relational database
with object oriented software'. FireStar alleges that Red Hat's
Hibernate
3.0 product infringes on the patent, and is demanding unspecified damages.
The case was filed on Monday in the Eastern District of Texas. A Red Hat
spokesman told
vnunet.com
that the company is aware of the situation and working on a resolution.
Red Hat acquired the Hibernate product last month when it
purchased
JBoss. The application is an object/relational persistence service that
offers similar functionality to FireStar's product. The application is governed
by the
GNU
Lesser General Public Licence.
The case could turn out to be a first test for several anti-patent shields
put up by open source providers over the past year.
The
Open
Source Development Lab launched the
Patent
Commons project last year that aims to help developers avoid infringing on
patents.
Numerous patent holders, including
IBM,
Novell,
Red Hat
and Sun
Microsystems, have pledged not to use their patents against open source
projects, although some pledges are more limited in their scope than others.
But anti-patent activist
Florian
Mueller dismissed the OSDL project as a "placebo initiative".
"Depending on how the FireStar suit evolves, Red Hat may have to answer the
question of whether it grossly overstated the benefit of those initiatives to
open source developers and users," he
wrote
on his blog.
"Apparently, the patent projects supported by Red Hat have not really
discouraged FireStar from suing."
A PDF document with the complaint and a description of the disputed patent is
available on the
Patently
O blog.
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