The Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux vendor has been sued by FireStar Software Inc, a Boxborough, Massachusetts-based provider of transaction-automation and data-persistence software.
According to Firestar’s complaint filed with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Red Hat, and specifically the Hibernate technology it acquired with JBoss, has infringed US Patent No 6,101,502, which relates to interfacing an object-oriented software application with a database.
FireStar applied for the patent in September 1998 and received the approval of the US Patents and Trademarks Office in August 2000. In its filing it said it wrote to JBoss in May alerting it to the potential infringement, and followed that up with a letter to Red Hat earlier this month following the completion of its acquisition of JBoss.
Red Hat did not respond to requests for comment by press time but has in the past indicated its desire to vigorously defend itself against patent claims despite its official position that patents generally impede innovation in software development and… are inconsistent with open source/free software.
The company teamed up with IBM, Novell, Sony, and Royal Philips Electronics in November 2005 to launch the Open Invention Network, a non-profit organization set up to buy up patents to protect open source software.
The Hibernate project was created by Australian Java developer Gavin King and came under the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System wing after the company hired the core development team in 2004.
