A software patent attack on Red Hat

kdekorte — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 02:37:12 +0000

After a brief look at this patent, I believe Documentum has prior art to this patent. My company was using Documentum to do applications that did what the patent described in 1996

A software patent attack on Red Hat

iabervon — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 15:37:09 +0000

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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A software patent attack on Red Hat

A software patent attack on Red Hat