A software patent attack on Red Hat [LWN.net]

Red Hat is long been a likely target of legal attacks; the company has a high profile, customers who can be threatened, and a bank balance which is worth the trouble of coveting. So it is not entirely surprising that a small company called FireStar chose Red Hat as the target for a software patent suit. It is unlikely to be the last.

The patent in question is US patent 6,101,502, which is said to be infringed by the "Hibernate" product acquired with JBoss. This patent, filed in 1998, asserts the following claim:

A method for interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database, comprising the steps of:

selecting an object model;
generating a map of at least some relationships between schema in the database and the selected object model;
employing the map to create at least one interface object associated with an object corresponding to a class associated with the object oriented software application; and
utilizing a runtime engine which invokes said at least one interface object with the object oriented application to access data from the relational database.

In other words, this is a patent on an object-oriented wrapper for data in a relational database management system. To say that this idea is obvious is to understate the case. The first thing any object-oriented programmer does is to create classes to encapsulate the data to be manipulated; of course such a programmer would create a series of objects to represent relations in an RDBMS. One would expect that it would be possible to examine a large number of object-oriented programs which work with RDBMS systems and not find a single one which lacks this sort of impedance-matching layer. So the world did not need to wait until 1998 for the authors of this patent to come up with this idea.

Thus, if Red Hat puts up a suitable level of resistance, it should be able to get this patent invalidated. But there is little comfort to be found there. There are thousands of these patents in circulation and no shortage of trolls willing to exploit them to line their own pockets. One such case can be beaten down; but there will be more than one. Perhaps many more. Software patents have long been seen as a serious threat to free software; now we are beginning to see this threat come to life.

[As an aside, there have been some allegations that at least one Red Hat employee engaged in pro-patent lobbying in Europe last year, and that, as a result, this suit represents a sort of poetic justice. See this week's Letters Page for a discussion of both sides of this issue. The statement from FFII found there would appear to establish that Red Hat's position on software patents has been clear and consistent.]

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A software patent attack on Red Hat

Posted Jul 7, 2006 15:37 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

From the description in the article, it seems to me like this only covers using a database to back a object-oriented object model, not other potential arrangements for accessing a database with a program in an object-oriented programming language. It seems to only apply to the (common) pattern of designing the data as being object-oriented, with a relational persistence engine, rather than as relational, with an object-oriented access method.

So it is unfortunately not quite as defective a patent as it might be; if it would have applied to JDBC, it would probably be easy enough to demonstrate that the patent was gotten in bad faith (since it would have been impractical to implement without using prior art, so the applicants wouldn't have possibly not known that their patent wasn't valid), and Red Hat's lawyers would stand a good chance of getting their costs covered by FireStar.