Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Red Hat bridges patents to the GPL – without coupons

Red Hat made a very interesting move in resolving patent litigation and opened a new intellectual property bridge between GPL software and patent rights. Red Hat fought for the community on this one settling with provisions to also protect up/downstream developers and distributors. This really was a crafty move and the SFLC appears to have blessed it as well. Groklaw quotes Eben saying:

“Red Hat’s settlement of outstanding patent litigation on terms that provide additional protection to other members of the community upstream and downstream from Red Hat is a positive contribution to the resources for community patent defense. We would hope to see more settlements of this kind–in which parties secure more than their own particular legal advantage in relation to the third-party patent risk of the whole FOSS community–when commercial redistributors of FOSS choose to settle patent litigation. SFLC welcomes Red Hat’s efforts on the community’s behalf.”

I need to spend more time thinking about all the implications of this, but one thing is clear… Steve Ballmer was not required to build this “bridge” ;-)