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Red Hat Sued Over Hibernate ORM Patent Claim
fmarines writes "Firestar Software has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent Firestar filed in 2000 covering O/R mapping. The amount of the lawsuit was not disclosed. The complaint centers around JBoss 3, and the patent claims that JBoss was given prior notice that marketing, distribution, and support services violates Firestar's patent, and that Firestar 'has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages.' Firestar produces the ObjectSpark, an transactional object mapping engine which appears to not have had a new release since May 2003, according to the Firestar press release page."
Red Hat Sued Over Hibernate 3 ORM Patent Infringement Claim
Posted by Floyd Marinescu on jun 29, 2006 09:40 PM
Community Java Topics Legal Matters, Data Access, Business
Firestar Software has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent Firestar filed in 2000 covering O/R mapping. The amount of the lawsuit was not disclosed. The complaint centers around JBoss 3, and the patent claims that JBoss was given prior notice that marketing, distribution, and support services violates Firestars patent, and that Firestar "has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages." Firestar produces the ObjectSpark, an transactional object mapping engine which appears to not have had a new release since May 2003, according to the Firestars press release page.
The patent covers (from US Patent office patent # 6,101,502):
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. ide interface objects that are utilized by an object oriented software application to access the relational database.
Interestingly, the same patent (follow link for full PDFs) was filed under a different company name to the European patent office back in 1998, but was withdrawn. The patent is not related to yet another patent Mapping architecture for arbitrary data models filed in 2005.
Patent experts told InfoQ that the lawsuit appears to be skillful manoeuvring on Firestar's part; they waited until after the JBoss Red Hat acquisition intentions were announced and notified JBoss about the potential infringement on May 26th, which was within the JBoss Red Hat due dilligence period. This would have required JBoss to either instantly settle with Firestar or be forced to notify Red Hat which could have cancelled the acquisition deal, which was announced as finalized on June 5th (with Red Hat aware of the risks). Firestar then notified Red Hat on June 7th that they were in violation of Firestar's patent. As a further example of manoeuvring, the word among patent experts is that the specific district Firestar selected to perform the lawsuit in (eastern district of Texas) is famous among patent circles because a patent claimant has never lost a lawsuit there.
It seems clear that the timing of the lawsuit was designed to take advantage of the Red Hat acquisition. Firestar certainly had other potential targets, including Oracle (TopLink), BEA (Kodo), and even the JCP (EJB JPA).
Note: updated June 29th, 10:40pm
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Exactly. They'll have to go after TopLink as well, which certainly predates 2000. Hell, I was working with a commercial framework called 'Persistence' in 1997 that used a similar approach (albeit in C++).
All these projects have been registered before or in 2000 (when the patent has been filed according to TFA):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgrinder
http://sourceforge.net/projects/leap
http://sourceforge.net/projects/neo
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nexusproject
As this is a patent it shouldnt matter too much, if they actually had a working implementation at that time. (IANAL and all that jazz).
That would nip this in the bud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestar
Recall that RIM was forced to settle to the tune of half-a-billion dollars even though the patents were in the process of being successfully challenged. I don't know if the settlement involved dropping the challenge, too.
I have read the patent and in my opinion it does not describe a method at all. It is just an example, with a few diagrams, of how a mapping might be done. There are thousands of academic papers that describe systematic ways of doing this, and lots of products, too.
So what exactly does this patent cover? A for instance of how to map the "name" method of an object into a "name" column in a table?
It is laughable that this patent was granted; however, I doubt Red Hat share the laughter.
Toplink also has been there fore ages (92 or 93), the patent is not worth the toilet paper it was written on, and as usual the USPTO has proven not to have any knowledge of the fields it grants patents on.
Smalltalk at an OR/M mapping engine from about 1994. I think I'm right in saying it was subsequently acquired by Oracle, ported to Java and became know as Toplink. In any case it's a pretty clear-cut prior art so the patent won't stand if anyone wants to defend it.
Ugh, I hate trolls. Regardless, this is nothing but an object mapping, and it has been around years before Firestar. This should be an easy one for Red Hat.
Regards,
Steve
My former boss (CTO) at one of the largest catalog companies in the US has a degree in cartography. My current boss (CTO/COO) has a (master's) degree in English.
NeXT had an OR mapper in WebObjects over a decade ago, so either you can implement an OR mapper without violating this patent or there is prior art (since the patent was only filed in 2000, 4 years after NeXT had a shipping product).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2F srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,101,502.PN.&OS=PN/6, 101,502&RS=PN/6,101,502
and
http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/!ut/p/_s.7 _0_A/7_0_CH/.cmd/ad/.ar/sa.getBib/.c/6_0_69/.ce/7_ 0_1ET/.p/5_0_18L/.d/1?selectedTab=fileHistorytab&i sSubmitted=isSubmitted&dosnum=09161028#7_0_1ET
6. The method of claim 1 further including the step of mapping class inheritance to rows within a table.
Clearly the person writing the patent doesn't understand object oriented programming or databases. Row 2 extends row 1? I think not (except maybe as a lab experiment proving it's possible).
And as an aside, I have violated this patent. Twice. A friend of mine working on the same project was violating it at the same time. Then we hired a third guy who violated it again. Yes, we have a project which contains four, count 'em, four, independently developed O-R mapping tools. Three of them (one of mine and the two others) were developed not knowing the others existed. Then someone recommended TopLink, which we chose not to use. Then a friend of mine showed me WebObjects, which we chose not to use. Then we hired a guy who told us about Hibernate, which we now use. WebObjects started as a NeXT project in the mid 90's. TopLink is older than the patent (I think). Our independent implementations were done without knowing about any of the existing tools or the patent, and before (I admit with some shame) we were aware of Scott Ambler's outstanding research on the subject (which dates back to 1998).
Summary judgement to the defendant, obvious and not novel.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The patent acknowledges that other Object Relational methods exist. They are saying that they have a better one. So yes prior art for OR mappers exist, but that is not what they are patenting. Without any information as to which claim they believe to be violated, we can only speculate. I have seen OR mappers without many of the features discussed in the claims, so the idea that they were the first to implement some of these claims is not beyond belief.