Stroke one up for the patent trolls. The patent trigger-happy judges in East Texas have decided that Linux violates a patent. Along with Google, who lost this case, Red Hat has big interests in this as the systems in question were running RHEL.

An East Texas Jury has decided that Google has been infringing a patent through its use of Linux and must pay $5 million to East Texas based Bedrock Computer Technologies. The suit, filed in 2009, concerns patent 5,893,120, “Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data”, filed in 1997 and granted in 1999. Bedrock claimed that the technique outlined is used in Linux and on that basis sued Google, Yahoo, MySpace, PayPal, Amazon, Match.com, AOL, CME Group and two small software companies – Softlayer and Citiware, based in East Texas – for patent infringement. The latter two companies were included apparently to ensure that the cases be heard in East Texas’s patent litigation friendly courts.

As the case progressed, a number of the defendants, being Red Hat customers, called on Red Hat to intervene, which it did in December 2009 with a separate suit and then directly, seeking to have the patent declared invalid. Red Hat’s direct intervention was blocked, but the separate suit is still ongoing. Google is expected to appeal after issuing a statement saying it “will continue to defend against attacks like this one on the open source community”. The cases are also still ongoing for the other defendants and Red Hat.

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Stroke one up for the patent trolls. The patent trigger-happy judges in East Texas have decided that Linux violates a patent. Along with Google, who lost this case, Red Hat has big interests in this as the systems in question were running RHEL. An East Texas Jury has decided that Google has been infringing a ...