Summary: The patent troll known as Acacia loses its case against Red Hat and against Novell

ONE vigilant reader has just sent us a heads-up regarding the decision announced below. GNU/Linux wins and Acacia loses in a patent case which is important. The press release from Red Hat is as follows and we will cover this in more detail later on. ⬆

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Red Hat Prevails in Federal District Court

RALEIGH, N.C., Apr 30, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 29.87, -0.91, -2.96%) , the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced that today a jury in federal court in Marshall, Texas, returned a verdict in favor of Red Hat, Inc. and Novell, Inc. in a case alleging patent infringement brought by IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation and Technology Licensing Corporation.

The patents at issue were found to be invalid and worthless.

“The patents at issue were found to be invalid and worthless.”"This is the result we expected and we are gratified that the jury recognized the tremendous innovative value of open source software. The jury knocked out three invalid patents that were masquerading as a new and important inventions, when they were not," said Michael Cunningham, Executive Vice President at Red Hat. "We appreciate the jury's wisdom and remain committed to providing value to our customers, including through our Open Source Assurance program. We also remain stalwart in resisting bogus shakedown tactics."

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and a component of the S&P 500, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.