According to the press release from Redhat, the parties settled out of court.  Redhat admitted no wrongdoing, and additionally got protection from further lawsuits related to the Datatern/Firestar patent regarding all predecessor and derivative software.

This is a huge victory for open source, although it might not seem so on the surface.  Juding by the settlement, it would appear that Redhat could have won the suit handilly had it gone to trial.  While this would have been a Good Thing, it would have only protected Redhat.  Instead, Redhat was able to drive a settlement that protected not only Redhat, but the entire open source community, by ensuring that no product on which Hibernate was based, and no product (now or in the future) which was based on Hibernate, could ever again be sued under this patent.

Groklaw has a really good explanation and breakdown of this.

Discuss in the forums!  

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