A belated look at the Red Hat/Firestar patent settlement
Posted Jun 25, 2008 0:49 UTC (Wed) by
bdixon (subscriber, #1055)
Parent article:
A belated look at the Red Hat/Firestar patent settlement
I wrote a mostly congratulatory posting on this... also quite belatedly. My thought on the matter of why didn't RH have the patent invalidated may have had plenty to do with the fiduciary duties of the company officers.
What if Red Hat had pushed for an invalidation and lost? Would they have then been in a far worse place than if they had chosen the path of settlement? I'm glad Jonathan discussed this possibility in the last paragraph.
This isn't the usual "let's cross license our patents" type of settlement that is all too common and propagates the controversial uses of software patents. I'd wager a beer that Red Hat had to give up something to get the settlement terms they got.
"Is this really the way to "discourage future similar cases"?" I would guess that anything that throws uncertainty into the risk/reward analysis that must go through a patent attorney's mind is beneficial.
Yes... the settlement terms would be very enlightening. Hope we get to see them.
Nice article.
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