And of course, now that Red Hat has brought the big bugs (slip of the tongue: bucks was meant) to Hibernate, someone wants to cash in on that money.

Apparently, some company holds a Patent on ORM. So why only Hibernate and not Toplink, iBatis, or any other ORM framework that is out there?

Fortunately there seems to be a lot of prior art for ORM solutions, so this patent will probably not hold up in court. There is one lesson to learn here, repeat after me:

Software Patents Suck

ps. thanks for pointing out the typo.