Some lawsuits take longer than others to settle -- just ask Linux vendor Red Hat. Today, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced that it had reached an agreement to settle a class-action lawsuit from some of its shareholders that started back in July 2004."

On behalf of the developers of the BusyBox embedded utilities collection, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed suit against 14 consumer electronics companies for violating GPLv2 licensing requirements. The lawsuit covers almost 20 Linux-based products, from companies including Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC, says the SFLC.

Artifex Software Inc. today announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Palm, Inc., based on Palm's unauthorized copying and distribution of one of Artifex's registered technologies

TiVo's shift to a strategy of patent litigation is not paying off, patent trolling becomes common, Microsoft rides the wave

BitTorrent is one of the most contentious technologies available. At least, that is, to the Old Order, those lovely suit-clad corporate types bent on holding technology forever in the days of the — manual — typewriter. The technology, and the suits' dreams of a world free of it, are on trial in Australia, where Linux made an appearance today — at the defense table.

Really soon the European Commission will finalize a settlement with Microsoft, possibly closing two big antitrust issues: the tying of the browser with Microsoft Windows and the withholding of interoperability information.

Without those IP rights, SCO didn't have a leg to stand on in all its other anti-Linux lawsuits against IBM, Novell, Red Hat, et. al. So, now SCO can start again right? Ah wrong. It's much more complicated than that. Here's what really going to happen next.

Microsoft knew of the patent held by i4i as early as 2001, but instead set out to make the Canadian developer's software "obsolete" by adding a feature to Word, according to court documents.