Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Paid $4.2m To Settle Patent Suit
An anonymous reader writes "'Red Hat paid $US4.2 million to settle a patent infringement suit brought against it by FireStar Software, an intellectual property activist claims. Florian Mueller, who made a name for himself during the campaign to prevent the adoption of software patents in Europe some years ago, said he had dug up a court filing that showed the payment had been made.' Mueller says the payment made by Red Hat was kept secret but news about it surfaced in another suit."
Move along, now, move along...
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
How is this any new news ? Companies have lawsuits, sometime they win, sometime they lose. All type of companies, whether we like them or not. So really move along now, there is nothing to see.
The people who run these big companies (not necessarily) RedHat are known for being egotistical, nasty sons of bitches. It would be nice if the response we saw more and more from them to patent trolls was "crush them, burn them, leave their wives and children in the poor house." I mean be so nasty and vindictive that even after the troll goes bankrupt, they "pierce the corporate veil" and pursue the management and their families into bankruptcy.
Does Red Hat own any software patents itself? Surely if it is against the idea of software patents then it would be in its interest to show the wider software community what it has been driven to (if that is how it feels)? Or was it worried that defending itself would be long and complex, and would be ashamed to admit that it gave in? Perhaps it did not want to attract too much anti-patent campaigning, as this might scare away some of its bigger clients?
It would also be interesting to see what efforts were made at uncovering prior art. Speaking as a non-lawyer, I don't see anything particularly novel in the description, but maybe a very specific combination of elements is not considered to have existed previously.
So that's what Spider Man's amazing friends are up to these days. Wonder if Ice Man is involved in this as well?
RedHat settles a lawsuit and obtained the ability to continue to include code that was found to be patented by others. RedHat paid the cash and in exchange the code is now available under the GPL v.[23] with no further repercussions either upstream towards developers or downstream towards JBoss users. Did they license the code with that cash? That's not what it looks like. It looks like the cash was paid as a penalty and the legal team at RedHat made sure that was all that would ever be paid for the use of that. Did RedHat buy the license with that cash? Not sure but that is allowed in the GPL (my understanding at least. IANAL).
This guy is just sensationalist troll seeking attention. Remember how he has recently claimed that he has a "proof" that Google violated Sun's copyrights in Android? It was very soundly debunked. He is just using this "secret" to attack RedHat for no reason - spin alert, guys! Not exactly a credible source to report ...
Wikipedia defines royalties as "usage-based payments made by one party (the "licensee") and another (the "licensor") for ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property.". While wikipedia is not authoritive that matchs my own understanding of royalties. By their very nature royalty payments are on going.
Thus Redhat is not paying royalties to FireStar (present tense) they have paid (past tense) money to them as a royalty-buy-out (meaning neither they, nor any downstream user, must pay royalties).
This does not, in any sense whatsoever, contradict the position that royalty encumbered standards are incompatible with the GNU GPL.
Typical Florian. RedHat didn't keep the payment secret. What they redacted was the amount of the payment, not that there was a payment. I suspect it was redacted at the insistence of the other party, who didn't want any of their other victims knowing what kind of deal to shoot for themselves.
Well color me surprised. Just for fun, type "Florian Mueller Microsoft" into your search engine of choice and read some of the results from the first page. This guy pretends to be a friend of Open Source, but his actions speak otherwise. I would be ashamed, after taking money from Red Hat, to be writing articles attempting to cause them grief.
As other have noted, Florian is now a Microsoft Shill. Yes, he made himself a name in the F/OSS community a while back; only then he later sold it to Microsoft as part of the OOXML ISO process, and has continued with Software Patents and anything else MS wants him to write about. So, take anything he says with a grain of salt at best - if you give any credence to it at all.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I thought Linix (as in RedHat etc) was free software. If it's free what did they use to pay the 4.2 million????? You see, as a developer of software I hate this notion that open source means free. SOMEONE pays at some point......
Did anybody else but me think about "RedHat 4.2" when you first saw this title? Another oddity: there were exactly 42 comments..
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
You know something, I never liked RedHat. RH Linux always filled me with disgust whenever I had to use it. I hope RH dies my friends.