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This is the second time that Red Hat’s JBoss Hibernate technology has been hit with a patent-infringement suit. However, it’s telling that neither FireStar (the first plaintiff) nor Software Tree (the second) filed against JBoss, though the same allegedly infringing code would have been extant prior to the Red Hat acquisition.

Congratulations, Red Hat. Doesn’t it feel great?

Savio Rodrigues points out that Software Tree doesn’t appear to be a garden-variety patent troll. It has a real business. It’s ironic, however, that this business wasn’t too concerned with JBoss until Red Hat’s deeper pockets backed it.

To its detriment, Red Hat is now a big enough and important enough company to have patent infringement lawsuits become part of its daily existence.

Why bother with JBoss? There’s much more money in the Red Hat till.

Funny, that.

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Welcome to the patent defense club, Red Hat. Get used to the new norm of fending off lawsuits from patent trolls and insignificant software companies with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Even so, as Microsoft and others regularly besieged by patent-infringement lawsuits will tell you, it’s better to be big and targeted than small and ignored.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

This isn’t, of course, the first lawsuit that Red Hat has faced. Firestar, IP Innovation, and DataTern have also launched lawsuits against Red Hat, at least two of which have been settled. Red Hat, to its credit, resolved these patent suits in favor of the broader open-source community, though Sun later went one step further and invalidated the patents.

In technology, the best indication that you’ve “arrived” as a company is when you get hit by a patent infringement suit. By this measure, Red Hat, which was just hit by a patent-infringement suit from little-known Software Tree, is ready to join an elite circle of premier software vendors like IBM, Microsoft, and HP, each of which spends a lot of time and money defending against patent lawsuits.

This post was updated at 10:27 a.m. PT.

Some logistics, as reported by TechCrunch: five of Summize’s six employees will become Twitter employees, minus founder Jay Verdy, who will depart the company for “a new project.” Naturally, no one’s naming numbers–though the Silicon Alley Insider puts it at around $15 million. The transaction was, reportedly, mostly in stock.

So what does this mean? Basically, that Twitter won’t have to build its own search engine. Simple enough.

The news follows sporadic rumors that were accompanied by both shaky confirmations and shaky denials. An under-the-radar blogger, Josh Chandler, reported the news first; GigaOM’s Om Malik was the first big name to “confirm” it.

Twitter has indeed acquired Summize, a nifty search engine built specifically to index Twitter posts, TechCrunch reported Tuesday along with a video of Twitter founder Evan Williams talking about it.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

He brought up examples like Google.org, the Omidyar Network, and even small companies that have decided to take on social and political challenges rather than the trendy social-network craze of the week. “Business is the engine of innovation,” O’Reilly said. “I really believe in markets, and I believe in the power we all have to build great companies that change things.”

But O’Reilly encouraged the audience to start small, and he offered them their first challenge: register to vote.

To be fair, O’Reilly Media has been printing fewer event programs and encouraging conference goers to recycle, and it has used carpeting made of post-consumer material.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News)

“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

“Do you see a problem here?” he posed, showing another slide of the popular
iPhone app “iBeer,” which simulates chugging a pint. “You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?”

NEW YORK–Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, is known as a futurist, but his keynote address on Thursday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo was heavy on the realism in the wake of sobering news from Wall Street.

There’s an inherent irony in what O’Reilly said, given the fact that massive conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo are packed with the trendspeak and hype that birthed SuperPoke-like entertainment, and certainly aren’t helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag–not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions.

As for the financial-services industry, O’Reilly implied that in a big sense, firms had it coming. “If you look at what went wrong on Wall Street, this is an industry that, in its heart, parades a lot of value,” he said. “Liquidity in markets is critical. But if you look at the last decade…these Wall Street firms captured a lot more value than they were creating.”

Global warming. The U.S. losing its edge in science and technology. A growing income gap. “And what are the best and the brightest working on?” O’Reilly asked, displaying a slide of the popular Facebook application SuperPoke, which invites you to, among other things, “throw sheep” at your friends.

Web 2.0 evangelist Tim O'Reilly addresses the crowd at the last Web 2.0 Expo, in April.

There is clearly a lot that needs to change, and perhaps the tech industry trend of large-scale conferences is part of it. We’ll see whether Silicon Valley’s leaders and moguls are willing to do what they think is right, rather than what they think is profitable.

Community is the tonic that keeps corporate aspirations in line, just as community helps to keep individuals walking the straight and narrow of societal norms. As The Economist recently highlighted, new research suggests that “having a crowd around often makes things better.”

For open-source companies increasingly experimenting with models that flavor open-source code with proprietary complements, it’s imperative that we guard against backsliding into the lock-in of the past proprietary decades. The way to ensure this is to spend as much time cultivating community as we do devising commercial add-ons to our otherwise open-source products.

Sometimes our best intentions give way to our worst, for a wide variety of reasons. This is as true of corporate amalgamations of individuals as it is of those individuals on their own, and it’s as true for open-source companies as it is for proprietary companies.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

But community is critical to ensuring the company doesn’t devote so much of its development resources to the proprietary bits that the core gets forgotten or, that if it does, the community can thrive in the company’s absence. A crowd can help avert violence. In open source, it can also help prevent good intentions going bad.

In other words, while we normally point to crowds as motivations for mob violence and such, it may be that crowds more often have a pacifying than an inflammatory effect on explosive situations.

I’ve written before that I think a transparent distinction and delivery of an open-source core and proprietary add-ons can be beneficial to one’s community. Most open-source businesses will find it hard to scale on a support-only revenue diet and given that big customers want their vendors to scale to reduce their investment risk, a conflict erupts that is much easier to manage with a hybrid approach.

There’s safety in community. Safety from the company’s best intentions getting clouded by its worst. Safety for customers.

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In other news, the neologism “viralocity” has officially been blacklisted from future use on CNET News.com.

Marketing agency Deep Focus is currently beta-testing the technology with its clients.

News Corp.’s social network MySpace.com made two advertising-related announcements Tuesday: the launch of a new “community building” platform so that advertisers can easily create a presence on the site, and the promotion of Jeff Berman to president of sales and marketing.

The ad platform, to put it simply, helps advertisers build MySpace profiles for their brands, complete with friend lists, widgets, blog entries, and ads provided by the site’s HyperTargeting ad program. If they aren’t familiar with MySpace’s structure or with the CSS and XHTML code skills necessary to make those profiles extra-sparkly, they can opt into a “full service” production option. In other words, this is a way for MySpace to make a few bucks off the creation of brand profiles, which any company can currently do for free using the tools available to ordinary members of the site.

“I’m beyond excited to work hand-in-hand with our brand partners to create compelling campaigns on MySpace,” Berman said in a release from MySpace. “This is an amazing opportunity to help brands reach their target audiences and leverage the viralocity of our ever-expanding global community.”

Additionally, longtime MySpace executive Jeff Berman has been promoted to president of sales and marketing, where he’ll oversee the new platform as well as HyperTargeting, online marketing, and other revenue-drawing initiatives at the social network. With a background in politics, Berman started at MySpace as senior vice president of public affairs, where he spearheaded the launch of the “Impact” political activism channel; he then moved to a leadership role in the MySpaceTV video portal.

But with CEO Steve Ballmer dodging eggs in Europe and the heads of Microsoft’s online business all gathered here, I wonder who it is that’s doing the talking with Yahoo?

Indeed it was the other one–Yahoo–that loomed largest inside the walls of the Microsoft Conference Center. At least three Microsoft executives spoke about the company’s online business but none addressed discussions with the Internet pioneer.

REDMOND, Wash.–Republican strategist Cyrus Krohn wasn’t the only elephant in the room at Microsoft’s ad conference on Tuesday.

Well, I guess that’s what having thousands of employees is good for–multitasking. I’m sure there are enough Microsoft online folks to simultaneously tell advertisers how strong its organic growth is while also talking to Yahoo to try to fix its obvious shortcomings.

If you’ve got several Gmail accounts and are frequently having to juggle signatures for each of them, worth downloading is Blank Canvas’ Gmail Signatures. This experimental
Firefox extension will drop in one of four custom HTML signatures based on whichever account you’re sending the message from. If you’re like me and have two or more accounts, setting this up is a big time saver.

Gmail Signatures is an experimental add-on, and as such you must be registered with Mozilla’s Firefox add-ons site to download it.

Pick out custom HTML signatures for Gmail, and get them to change based on what e-mail address you're sending them from.

It’s worth noting you cannot get at your custom signatures on browsers without the extension installed (even if it’s the same machine), and this will not change existing Gmail signature settings. This means that any Gmail-specific signature you have will still show up, however, they’ll appear underneath the one from the extension.

Once installed, you get a new drop-down menu that lets you select one of your four custom signatures. These can be managed directly within Gmail, and come with an editor that shows you a live preview of whatever HTML you drop in. Included are four presets with nicknames like personal, business, and family, all of which can be renamed to suit the type of signature you’ve set up.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Known issues with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 can be found in knowledgebase article 949787 and include problems with ClearType, exiting out of Windows Live Mail (Hotmail), and various problems when using search.

Are there other significant services that will not run within this new browser? Share your comments below.

Among the more embarrassing user-reported problems is one using Windows Live Meeting 2007 with IE 8 Beta 2 installed. CNET News has confirmed that Live Meeting, both using the Web-based and client download version, does not run under Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Nor does the built-in compatibility feature within IE 8 Beta 2 correct the glitch.

For those wanting to test Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 themselves, CNET Download has the link.

One day after Microsoft released the second public beta for Internet Explorer 8, readers have contacted CNET News with warnings about its installation and sites and services that are incompatible. While such behavior is expected of beta software, some problems appear to exist within Microsoft services themselves.

Windows Live Meeting doesn’t recognize Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 as one of its supported browsers.

Another user-reported problem accessing Netflix “Watch Now,” an online streaming feature.

Microsoft acknowledges some of this. In a blog on Wednesday, Microsoft IE developers explain how
IE 8 users running Windows XP SP3 will not be able to downgrade back to IE 7 without uninstalling the service pack first. Indeed, depending on which version of Windows a person has, 32-bit or 64-bit edition, it will require specific steps to either install or remove the browser. For example,
Windows Vista users must be running SP1 before installing IE 8 Beta 2.

The face-lift, which has been in the works for a while and was released Sunday, will include an expanded Wall section that includes updates from a user’s Mini-Feed.

Facebook is hosting a platform event for developers later this week in San Francisco.

Not everyone will be able to view the new design immediately, Facebook said. Instead, it will gradually become available to all Facebook users over the next days at www.new.facebook.com. Previews have been popping up over the last week or so.

Social-networking site Facebook has unveiled its redesign.

One of the ideas behind the redesign is to make the site more compatible with micro-blogging–adding snippets of text, images, or video clips. The redesign also includes new tabs designed to make navigation easier.

The videos include a “Buy Now” button, which, in some cases, directs you to the website of the filmmaker/film and in others links to a place where you can buy a DVD or digital copy. Some of the links don’t exactly point to the right place yet and it’s a little unclear to me why people would want to buy a short film that they just watched for free online (aside from upgraded quality), but I’m sure the kinks will get worked out. The purchasing model might work better if and when they offer feature length films.

The YouTube Screening Room could give a great break to films that were not able to find a solid audience or were not even released to the public in the first place. Other than the obvious benefit of exposure, monetary benefits to those who are making these films have not been publicly discussed by YouTube.

Being a cinephile, I am excited to see the sort of films that come out of this new venture. They are off to a good start already with the four short films that they already have. YouTube Screening Room could prove to be a much needed boost to the indie film community.

YouTube has just announced the launch of the rumored YouTube Screening Room. The news broke yesterday that YouTube was going to be delving into professional films, with the possibility breaking out of their 10 minute mold and into longer form. YouTube is actively pursuing filmmakers to try and get high quality content for the site. The YouTube Screening Room has debuted with four short films, including one Academy Award winner and one nominee.

While it is not immediately clear whether or not YouTube will be pursuing longer subject films in addition to short subject ones, it is safe to assume that they are looking in that direction. Their blog post says that, “Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the YouTube Screening Room, a platform for films from around the world to find the audiences they deserve.” Given this statement, it does not appear that the site will be limited to short films.