Red Hat settled a patent dispute this week that had potentially wide reaching impact to the open source community. Matt Asay points out nicely that Red Hat has demonstrated the open-source way to quash patent lawsuits. 

"Typically when a company settles a patent lawsuit, it focuses on
getting safety for itself," said Rob Tiller, Vice President and
Assistant General Counsel, IP [Red Hat]. "But that was not enough for
us, we wanted broad provisions that covered our customers, who place
trust in us, and the open source community, whose considerable efforts
benefit our business."

This particular suit hits close to home as Sakai and Kuali, two open source projects that mean a lot to me, both use Hibernate, which was the target of this particular attack.

I've verified my interpretation with several people (including real attorneys) and Red Hat's settlement seems to cover Sakai and Kuali. Red Hat's approach to this makes good business sense for them but still we shouldn't take it for granted. It only makes good business sense for them because they truly understand the value of their open source ecosystem and because they've adopted the right set of values to be successful in that ecosystem. Thank you Red Hat from the Sakai and Kuali communities

One troubling thing about all of this is the ongoing threat patents pose to the software world. One article commenting on the Red Hat settlement applaud's Red Hat but points out that "pointed out an opinion that this is an example of patent trolls getting smarter. (By the way it's interesting that the article lumps Blackboard into the patent troll category). The article points out that  "what we're really seeing here is a skillful example of patent gamesmanship by the troll."