Robert Tiller (Red hat’s assistant General Council) has provided a pretty accessible explanation behind the recent Firestar settlement – the full settlement text (minus the financial details) is included. Meanwhile, Mike Dillon (Sun’s General Council) blogged that he’s confident that Sun’s legal team has nailed Firestar with Prior-Art and may have sucessfuly convinced the PTO to reject the original Patents. It’s great to see Patent Trolling effectively challenged from multiple directions – the more that happens the less $attractive$ it looks – the downside is that these people will just fall back to purse-snatching and pyramid schemes (or whatever they did before).

Forrester recently surveyed some European CIOs and have come to the conclusion that Open Source can save money but that OSS vendors need to demonstrate value. No shit Sherlock !

According to Forrester, this puts pressure on open-source suppliers such as Red Hat Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. “These companies can’t compel annual maintenance fees through upgrade rights, so they will need to demonstrate superior value through excellent service, or IT shops will look to internal support or third parties instead,”

Which is why it’s important to be the best in the business at supporting your customers.

This week I’ve been trying (and predictably failing) to keep up with Le TdF. Talking of performance enhancements  – Manik (lead for JBoss Cache) blogs about a new feature in JBoss Cache 3.0.0 – MVCC – pretty hot stuff. This hot apparently.

The Hibernate lawsuit was settled this week along with protection for upstream developers. Read the official FAQ here and commentary from sys-con, commendations for Red Hat’s legal team from over at Grocklaw and more opinion on Ars Technica

There’s a web-cast next Monday that shows a side of JBoss Middleware that might enlighten some – JBoss has made a huge amount of progress in meeting the challenges of data centres and operational environments – find out how we’re doing.