Open Source king, Red Hat, has settled patent suits with Firestar, Amphion and Datatern on a patent covering the Object-Relational Database Model.

The three companies claimed that their model was used in the jBoss Hibernate package — not in Red Hat Linux. The settlement is said to protect upstream developers and derivative works of the upstream software, thus protecting the overall Open Source community.

Richard Fontana, patent attorney for Red Hat and formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center, said  that Red Hat's settlement satisfies the most stringent patent provisions in open source licenses, is consistent with the letter and spirit of all versions of the GPL and provides patent safety for developers, distributors and users of open source software.

Richard Stallman, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, said  the deal is good for the free software community. I would not want to treat that as certain; they might have chosen not to mention some of the negative side.