NEW ORLEANS, JUNE 3, 2005: Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise announced today at the Red Hat Summit, strong commitment to patent reform to remove barriers to innovation. Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel at Red Hat, addressed the audience articulating a three-part intellectual property strategy aimed at ensuring an open right to innovate.

The first part of the strategy announced by Webbink builds on the work of the Fedora project, the free Linux project hosted by Red Hat. Red Hat will create the Fedora Foundation with the intent of moving Fedora project development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the Foundation. Red Hat will still provide substantial financial and engineering support, but this move will assure broader community involvement in Fedora-sponsored projects.

In recent months Red Hat has engaged in efforts to reform government public policy on patents in Europe and in the United States. Webbink talked specifically about Red Hat's engagement with the European Parliament to amend the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive. In the United States Red Hat has called for reform of the patent system to hold patent applications to a high standard of scrutiny to ensure better patent quality and to expand the rights of third parties to challenge questionable patent applications and issued patents.

The third arm of Red Hat's strategy is to work to protect open source by creating a Software Patent Commons. Much like the Creative Commons which encourages collaboration by wide sharing of rights under copyright, a Software Patent Commons would enable a future of free collaboration and thought sharing among software technologists with reduced concern over patents.

Says Javed Tapia, Director, Red Hat India, "For genuine innovators and entrepreneurs, patents have become 'broken glass on the highways of progress.' With patent restrictions, entrepreneurs and innovators have to be extremely careful to ensure that they are not walking into a legal minefield."

"Patents are not equal to innovation," stated Webbink. "More often, innovation occurs despite patents. What we observe today in the software industry is the use of patents to maintain market share, even where that market share has been obtained by anticompetitive means. We need to move away from a system of software patents compromised of trivial, incremental enhancements which block innovation to a system that is aimed at rewarding substantial innovation."

Red Hat has established a patent portfolio for the purpose of defending against the patent infringement claims of others. For more information please see Red Hat's Patent Policy

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