Firestar告JBoss/Hibernate侵犯ORM专利, RedHat受牵连

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InfoQ报道: http://www.infoq.com/news/RedHat-Sued-Due-to-Hibernate-3-O
 
Firestar Software  has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent Firestar filed in 2000 covering O/R mapping. The amount of the lawsuit was not disclosed. The complaint centers around Hibernate 3, and the patent claims that JBoss was given prior notice that marketing, distribution, and support services violates Firestars patent, and that Firestar "has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages." Firestar produces the ObjectSpark, an transactional object mapping engine which appears to not have had a new release since May 2003, according to the Firestars press release page.

在 US Patent office patent # 6,101,502 可以看到这项专利的详细内容.
大概研究了一下这里的内容, 其实它直接引用的其他专利早就涉及,涵盖了ORM的概念和一些方法,特别是:
Integrating relational databases in an object oriented environment 和 Dependent object class and subclass mapping to relational data store 这两个专利(分别由Oracle和IBM持有), 核心的ORM思想大同小异. 不知道是不是美国专利的判断原则, 只要有点改进就能重新申请专利, 如果真是这样的话, 应该也不难找出证据说明包括Hibernate在内的目前这些ORM与Firestar现在诉求的专利受保护内容的差异.