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The Red Hat-FireStar Settlement Agreement is Published

By Pamela Jones et al.

As you know, Red Hat and FireStar settled their patent litigation in June. One of the terms required confidentiality for 30 days, but that time period is over, so we now have the agreement [PDF] itself to study, minus only the clause on financial terms. Red Hat VP and Assistant General Counsel Rob Tiller announced the release of the document today:

In the spirit of freedom and openness, we are happy to make the agreement public today here. We hope it will be a useful tool both in addressing existing legal threats and also in suggesting methods for addressing threats as yet unknown.

The agreement is, of course, a legal document. Some of the language is routine legal terminology, and some concerns the parties to the case and is of no general interest. On the other hand, the agreement has some important ideas expressed in terminology that may be unfamiliar to the non-lawyer reader, and so some explanation may be useful. Here are some pointers on where to find the juicy parts and how to figure out what they mean. To state the obvious, this is not intended as legal advice and should not be relied on as such.

I wrote about it back in June, based on Red Hat's press release, but now we have the agreement itself, so we can verify that the settlement covers everybody, upstream and downstream, and not just Red Hat and not just Red Hat customers, while at the same time satisfying the requirements of the GPL. Tiller explains the various clauses. So let's go over some of the pertinent language in detail. Tiller explains it, but I'm going to break it down a bit more, to make sure you understand. Of course, in doing that, there is always a chance that I will make a mistake, and I'm not a lawyer, so if there is any perceived difference between what I write and what Tiller wrote, he's correct. I'm just trying to explain legal terminology in ways that make it more accessible to you. If you still have questions, you can send them to press@redhat.com. Tiller says they'll try to address them in future posts on Red Hat's site.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 15, 2008 (boomark / email).