This is not a question of preventing patent trolls from patenting the same thing.

Firstly, because AMQP has hundreds or thousands of areas that could be similarly patented: failover, federation, many types of exchange, remote administration, etc. It only takes one patent to hold the whole standard to ransom. Red Hat would have to patent every single technical aspect of the standard, which would be impossible in practical terms.

Secondly, because there are much cheaper ways of stopping patent trolls from patenting obvious things: publish them, register them as prior art at the USPTO.

It's naive to think that the only way patents are used is to 'go after' projects. 99% of the time, patents of this sort are used in discrete discussions with potential clients. "You know, we hold a patent on that... (hint hint)". This is enough to scare the customer into at least not using a rival product, open source or not. Indeed, patents that make it to court tend to die rather faster than patents used under the table.

The irony of this patent is that technically, it's not that interesting. Dynamic message routing on XML is not difficult, but not efficient. It's much faster to pre-calculate routing keys and indices, as the existing AMQP exchanges do.

So I think Red Hat are simply playing the game of collecting software patents like points.

However, I really expected better from Red Hat.

All patenting around open standards is a concern, both to developers of the standards, and users. A patent holder's intentions may, and often do, change over the course of the 20 years the patent may exist.

In this case, Red Hat seem to be seeking "ownership" of areas around the standard. They don't need to sue anyone to establish this, that is a straw man. The simple fact of owning patents is enough to scare potential customers away from competitors.

I've personally worked with Red Hat in fighting software patents in Europe but would not consider this story to be a troll. Any FOSS firm that is willing to spend money on patents, but not the fight against software patents (and I can tell you that to the best of my knowledge RHAT are not funding the main European groups against software patents), is working the wrong side.

So this story seems relevant if only to highlight how behaviour changes when money is involved.

When Red Hat seek software patents around an open standard, that's news.

This makes me really, really furious. Patents on open standards are evil, just a way of taxing those who make products on those open standards. I happen to know the background to AMQP really well. Most of what Red Hat has contributed is utter crap (read the 0-10 spec to get an idea of how poor!) The real work is done by others. Yet Red Hat want to claim patents on extensions of AMQP that should be standardised. Why? So they can collar clients and say, "we own the patents, buy our licenses or we'll sue you." Just like any common or garden patent troll.

I'm boycotting Red Hat as long as they pull stunts like this, and advising my clients and partners to do the same. Firms that deliberately create patent thickets around open standards do not deserve to get support from the FOSS community.

It's not Red Hat's Novell moment, it's their Unisys moment. Remember GIF? Remember Unisys's attempts afterwards to build a FOSS business?