Two suits against Red Hat for the way its JBoss Hibernate product maps objects to a relational database have been settled before the case went to court.

Neither party is revealing the terms of the settlement, but the Red Hat legal team is claiming that it has negotiated a settlement that not only protects Red Hat's JBoss product line but also the derivative works by independent developers using JBoss' Hibernate.

Shortly after acquiring JBoss in April 2006 for $350 million, Red Hat was sued by DataTern and Firestar Software, whose successor company appears to be Amphion, named in the settlement proceedings.

The agreement "assures that upstream developers are protected against patent suits by DataTern and Amphion. ... In addition, our distributors, customers and anyone else who uses Red Hat products are protected. ... This broad coverage is a significant benefit to the open source community," maintained the legal team in a blog posting on the Red Hat site on Wednesday.

The original Firestar claimed to have U.S. Patent No. 6,101,502 defining a method for connecting an object-oriented application to a relational database. The Red Hat legal team said "it denied the allegation and vigorously contested the claim" in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It also denied the validity of Firestar's patent.

The proceedings had gone through the discovery process where Red Hat and its challengers had exchanged information and documents. Shortly before the case was to go to argument before the court, "the parties agreed on settlement terms," according to the Frequently-Asked-Questions statement that Red Hat posted on the case.

Richard Fontana, one of two new patent attorneys added to the Red Hat legal staff last March, said in a statement: The settlement "satisfies the most stringent provisions in open source licenses, is consistent with the letter and spirit of all versions of the GPL, and provides patent safety for developers, distributors and users."

The case did not bring up Red Hat Enterprise Linux or raise any patent claims against it. The Red Hat legal team said the outcome of the case had no bearing on the statements made by Microsoft in 2007 that some of its code had found its way into the Linux kernel and subsystems.