For those who think that software patents are not a threat to open source, read this interesting article on Patently-O about a patent suit against RedHat. The dispute is generated by US Patent 6,101,502, a patent for an ” Object model mapping and runtime engine for employing relational database with object oriented software”. The abstract reads:

A mapping between an object model and a relational database is generated to facilitate access to the relational database. The object model can be created from database schema or database schema can be created from the object model. Further, the mapping can be automatically generated. The Database schema, object model and mapping are employed to provide interface objects that are utilized by a runtime engine to facilitate access to the relational database by object oriented software applications.

Who writes this stuff? Anyway, RedHat is one of the big players, so it is a good target for patent trolls, but it is still a bad sign for open source in general.

Categories: Open source

1 Comment

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Anonymous · June 30, 2006 at 7:55 am

Hi,I created a small website with MediaWiki, which is dedicated to collect Prior Art against this patent. This will help Red Hat and might prevent the same patent from beeing issued in Europe, Canada, Japan and other countries.Let's show the world that this wasn't a new invention in 1998 :)http://helpredhat.dyndns.org

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