Hibernate is facing a patent lawsuit or a ban!

The FireStar software company in Massachusetts filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in Texas this week, alleged that the Hibernate 3.0 software of JBoss infringes the technical patents of its connected relational database and object-oriented software (No. 6,101,502, named: object model mapping and runtime engine for employing relational database with object oriented software ).

The ORM technology allows developers to generate an object from the database schema or a database schema from the object.

Hibernate is An ORM tool for Java and is part of JEMS (JBoss Enterprise middleware software system) software.

During the review of the case, FireStar software named DaVinci-Matterhorn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the defendants JBoss, Red Hat and Red Hat, to compensate for the losses and banned them from continuing to infringe on patents.

The representative of Red Hat said that we know this situation. We are addressing this issue through appropriate legal channels.

Red Hat announced its plan to acquire JBoss for $ April this year in 0.35 billion and completed the deal in June this year. According to the lawsuit, FireStar sent a letter to JBoss on May 26, before the deal was completed. Then a letter was sent to Red Hat on June 7.

Analysts questioned why FireStar specifically held Red Hat's legal liability. This patent number (patent number 6,101,502) is related to the interface method of an object-oriented software application and relational database. This technology makes it easier to access relational databases. This technology is easily applied to other companies.

Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst at the Burton Group, a market research firm, said: why don't they sue oracle? Oracle has a deep wallet. Why not sue Sun Microsystems? Sun's Java Persistence API is very similar to Hibernate software.

None of FireStar software and its lawyers in charge of the case commented on the news.

Red Hat will face a long legal struggle and possibly a ban as the lawsuit calls the jury to hear the case.

Are you using Hibernate in your commercial products? This risk also brings risks to your applications. Once Hibernate infringes on the establishment of a patent and suffers a ban, your business products using Hibernate will also face legal risks. This lawsuit may have a profound impact on the ORM and even open-source circles, because many open-source applications, including Ruby on Rails, use the ORM technology.