Red Hat has settled patent infringement claims brought against it by Firestar Software and DataTern, the company announced Wednesday.

Financial terms of the settlements were not disclosed, but Red Hat said in a statement that it had secured "extensive protections for its customers and the larger open source community that Red Hat relies upon."

Firestar makes EdgeNode, a platform for handling business processes between enterprises. DataTern sells ObjectSpark, a data services runtime engine that moves data between an application's logical processing layer and data sources.

Red Hat has posted a FAQ on its Web site that contains background about the suit.

According to the document, Firestar originally sued Red Hat in 2006, claiming that JBoss' Hibernate product violated a patent it held. Firestar later assigned the patent to DataTern, which joined the suit.

The settlement nullifies the suit between the company, but also assures that Red Hat's developer community and customers are protected against future patent suits from DataTern and its parent company, Amphion Innovations, the FAQ states. The deal covers all Red Hat products and derivative works, according to Red Hat.

DataTern and Firestar could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.