OStatic

Red Hat has taken the unusual step today of publicly disclosing the terms of a settlement with Firestar Software over allegations of patent violation. At the time of the settlement, all Red Hat would say was that it "satisfies the most stringent patent provisions in open source licenses" Today, they're saying a bit more.

Β Rob Tiller, VP and Assistant General Counsel, IP, says the move is in response to requests from the community. "The free and open source software community is a spirited, independent-minded group of people who think for themselves. It is not surprising, therefore, that there have been numerous questions about the agreement and requests to make it publicly available."

Β Under the settlement, Red Hat receives β€œa perpetual, fully paid-up, royalty-free, irrevocable worldwide license of the Licensed Patents for any and all purposes . . . .” It covers Red Hat Licensed Products, including software and code distributed under a Red Hat Brand, and "combinations of such code with other code. Because this includes downstream derivatives and combinations based on projects developed upstream from Red Hat, JBoss, and Fedora, it covers not only software distributed by us, but also software from such projects that is distributed by our competitors such as Novell and Sun Microsystems under their own brands.

The 22-page document [PDF] contains affadavits and documents that outline the terms of the agreement, however specifics on any payments that changed hands have been redacted because "the parties agreed that this term must remain confidential."

• Red Hat
• patent
• firestar
• datatern
• court