"We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived." -- Bruce Perens
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We are now in a full blown Hot War that threatens all software development, commercial and open source. Blackboard's offensive patent attack against Desire2Learn is only one among many emerging lawsuits that will soon rock the entire software industry.
FireStar recently filed a lawsuit (also in East Texas) against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping in Hibernate (developed by JBoss), a popular component of Java applications. Jim Farmer of immagic has confirmed that Sakai uses Hibernate and is, therefore, vulnerable to both direct and indirect infringement charges by FireStar. Farmer has also confirmed that while uPortal 2 does not use Hibernate, plans are underway to incorporate the component in uPortal 3. FireStar's patent claim goes beyond Hibernate, which is only one implementation among many of the Object Relational paradigm. Potentially any web framework that uses ORM, including those deployed in PHP, Ruby on Rails, or .NET, is vulnerable.
In another patent case a small open source developer has been attacked for his model railroad software. Bob Jacobsen developed the JMRI model-railroad control software which he graciously distributes for free along with full souce code. Mr. Jacobsen was recently sent an invoice for $200,000 by Michael A. Katzer and his company, KAM.
We might think that the good guys, the true innovators, and the true entrepreneurs will ultimately prevail. The American IP Law Association estimates that defending a software patent lawsuit costs between 2 and 5 million dollars. Do you have that type of resource?
Source:
Bruce Perens, "The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers"
Primary source documents for the Blackboard, RedHat, and KAM patent cases can be found in immagic's rapidly growing eLibrary.
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