ORM + You = Lawsuit

"FireStar recently filed a lawsuit (also in East Texas) against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping in Hibernate (developed by JBoss), a popular component of Java applications. Jim Farmer of immagic has confirmed that Sakai uses Hibernate and is, therefore, vulnerable to both direct and indirect infringement charges by FireStar. Farmer has also confirmed that while uPortal 2 does not use Hibernate, plans are underway to incorporate the component in uPortal 3. FireStar's patent claim goes beyond Hibernate, which is only one implementation among many of the Object Relational paradigm. Potentially any web framework that uses ORM, including those deployed in PHP, Ruby on Rails, or .NET, is vulnerable."

[1] http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2006/08/the_patent_cris.html

Published Monday, August 21, 2006 11:01 PM by Jesse Ezell
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Comments

# re: ORM + You = Lawsuit

Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:50 PM by FransBouma

I don't think the .NET o/r mappers are vulnerable to these people, and neither is JBoss. O/R mapping is rather old: Toplink is over 10 years old, and older than this patent.

What's even more strange is that the firestar patent actually doesn't really match what Hibernate uses. The patent of O/R mapping which does (yes more companies have an o/r mapping patent) is Microsoft's, because Microsoft's patent actually is about mapping info stored in xml files, exactly what hibernate uses.

Firestar is a company which sells an extremely expensive o/r mapper (20,000$ a pop!) and obviously it is tanking, especially on Java where hibernate has a huge marketshare (over 50%, estimated).

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