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by Jason Carreira.
Original Post: Thought Inc. Patent and Prior Art
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I'm almost afraid to post this, lest I be the next to be awarded with a threat of lawsuit, but here goes.
As you undoubtedly know by now, Ward Mullins, CTO of Thought Inc. (makers of Cocobase, an O/R tool) is going on about potential Intellectual Property violations by the Hibernate project and potential damages due from users of Hibernate over at TheServerSide. This all revolves around Thought Inc's patent. As you can see, Ward was the inventor listed on this patent. As you can also see, the filing date on the patent is March 20, 1997. The filing date is the important date on a Patent as it establishes the date after which intellectual property is considered to be owned by the patent holder when the patent is finally approved (January 5, 1999 in this case). It's also the date before which similar works are considered to be "Prior Art", which is supposed to prevent the patent from being approved and can be used to invalidate a patent in a legal proceeding.
Along these lines, I did some very cursory investigation into the history of TopLink, and found this:
TopLink was created 10 years ago as a professional services framework in the Smalltalk industry.
In 1996 we got to learn from our experiences with the Smalltalk version and rewrite TopLink in Java
Early 1997 first fully supported release of TopLink Java
Now, I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this would count as prior art and would pretty much make the above listed patent worthless. The idea of an object/relational mapping framework had been out there for a decade and was even productized before Ward's patent was filed. I hope Gavin and other Hibernate users weren't feeling any worry, because I think they can pretty safely sleep well at night. :-)
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