Refunds [LWN.net]

Refunds

Posted Jul 12, 2008 16:04 UTC (Sat) by ledow (guest, #11753)
Parent article: Sun invalidates the Firestar patent

Would Red Hat now be eligible for a refund on whatever it has bought?  There must have been a
contract which says somewhere that the patent was owned by the company and now that's no
longer true (or will be once the appeals go through and get knocked down), won't that be the
equivalent of not having kept their side of the deal?

It's like SCO "licensing" Linux.  If it turns out that they don't actually own anything to
license in Linux, then a lot of people will be turning up because they haven't kept up their
end of the contract.  It depends a lot on the small print, I should think, but let's hope this
question is resolved quicker than the SCO deal and that Red Hat has good lawyers and is,
indeed, entitled to its money back now.

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Refunds

Posted Jul 13, 2008 4:17 UTC (Sun) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

And most importantly there was never a statement that money changed hands at all. 

I always took the settlement to be the company backing down completely based on evidence
Redhat showed them. In fact I saw the taking of the patent license to every patent in their
portfolio to be a statement that Redhat had some nasty evidence that resulted in the payoff to
Redhat of a full patent license for all of open source for every patent in their portfolio to
prevent Redhat from taking that evidence to the patent office. 

All sun has now done is take the same evidence to the patent office and invalidate the patent
while open source is still protected from all the other patents. If anything it tells patent
trolls that they better watch out when trying to assert patent's against the community.

Refunds

Posted Jul 14, 2008 15:12 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Now that does make a lot of sense.  I couldn't see Red Hat paying Danegeld for a patent they
could prove was bogus; it just didn't seem in character for Red Hat, not to mention being
extremely poor strategy.  After all, once you pay Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

On the other hand, bargaining for patent protection from the troll company in exchange for not
invalidating the patent they were using to threaten Red Hat?  That I can see quite easily.
Very clever, too.