A company called Firestar Software, which specializes in business software, particularly information exchange, has filed a lawsuit against Red Hat for supposed patent infringement. Last month, Red Hat was getting ready to finalize the acquisition of a company called JBoss. JBoss was the actual company supposedly infringing on Firestar's software patent, but with JBoss being required to notify Red Hat of the situation and Red Hat still pursuing the acquisition, it now becomes a Red hat problem. The article mentions that Firestar most likely deliberately waited until the acquisition was nearing an end, to give themselves an advantage. It goes into more detail about Firestar's actions:
As a further example of [maneuvering], the word among patent experts is that the specific district Firestar selected to perform the lawsuit in (eastern district of Texas) is famous among patent circles because a patent claimant has never lost a lawsuit there.
The patent in question defines a series of steps for a program to query a database and retrieve information from it. A relatively simple feat for sure, but apparently one complex enough to sue over. It will be interesting to see Red Hat's response.