At Red Hat Analyst Day, executives outline the tech and business future of the Linux leader.

The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.

Red Hat has filed an amicus brief with the United States Supreme Court. In the brief, Red Hat explains the practical problems of software patents to software developers.

"We're often asked why we don't endorse a particular system—usually a popular GNU/Linux distribution. The short answer to that question is that they don't follow the free system distribution guidelines. But since it isn't always easy to see how a particular system fails to follow the guidelines, we still get these questions.

When you look at the Redhat balance sheet and its latest results you have to say, wow, this company seems to have their business under control. But I wonder, if not something bigger is happening.

Red Hat reveals details about Microsoft's marketing of anti-FOSS patents; other patent news summarised

Linux vendor Red Hat sure doesn't seem to like Microsoft much. Red Hat is now alleging that Microsoft is not committed to the path of peace with open source software vendors.

Red Hat has released RHEL 5.4, a major point update of its commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces support for KVM, a significant milestone in Red Hat's evolving virtualization strategy.