Red Hat Sued Over Hibernate ORM Patent Claim
Published by peter June 30th, 2006 in java.After the big takeover of JBoss by Redhat, what else was to be expected then small companies smelling money. Slashdot features a post about Firestar filing a patent claim against Redhat claiming that they ‘have suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages.’.
Funny to see this claim being filed after Hibernate moved to Redhat… I just hate this sort of non-constructive patent stuff.
O.k. for the outsiders, a bit more information:
- Hibernate is the de facto ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework for Java, and a big part of the latest JEE standard is based upon it.
- Hibernate was/is a subproject of JBoss
- JBoss was bought by Redhat a couple of months ago
- FireStar alleges that Hibernate violates U.S. patent 6,101,502 — ” Object model mapping and runtime engine for employing relational database with object oriented software.” (wow, is this a valid patent? what about Ruby’s Active Record? Toplink? Kodo? JDO?)
- I never met anyone using Firestar products
- Patent experts seem to agree on the fact that the lawsuit appears to be skillful manoeuvring on Firestar’s part; they waited until after the JBoss Red Hat acquisition intentions were announced and notified JBoss about the potential infringement on May 26th, which was within the JBoss Red Hat due dilligence period.
Well, if it was within the due dilligence period Redhat could have just renigged on the contract.
That is what the due dilligence period is for.
I might know fairly little about Firestar (Who???) or Jboss (What???) but I know my way around patents and such.
Well sure, Redhat could have done this. However this was not my point… My problem with this is that a company like Firestar, which for sure knew about Hibernate before Redhat bought JBoss, waited for the big dollars to claim their patent.
The use of Hibernate changed A LOT in the Java EE landscape, in a really positive way… the claim by Firestar seems to be solely related to making money over someones else’s back… not a single positive aspect to the Java community AT ALL!