Red Hat settles Hibernate patent suit

If you’re one of the many, many people who use the Hibernate ORM framework, you may or may not know that Red Hat was being sued by a patent troll company that claimed that Hibernate infringed on its intellectual property. (I’m not sure what their patent covered — the very concept of object-relational mapping itself? I hope not…) Anyway, Red Hat (which inherited Hibernate when it bought JBoss) has come to an agreement that not only ends the lawsuit but protects the GPL status of the project, at least according to Bruce Perens (although there’s a lively debate in the comments of that post over the minutia). As ever, Groklaw has the gory details.