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A software patent attack on Red Hat

A software patent attack on Red Hat

Posted Jul 7, 2006 15:37 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: A software patent attack on Red Hat

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.


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