On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 01:12:49PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote: > On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:37:05AM -0500, Nico Williams wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:40:41AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > > Sun Microsystems seemed reasonably trustworthy too. > > > > Are there patent grants from Sun that Oracle has attempted to renege on? > > Are there court cases about that? Links? > > No, but I bet there are things Oracle is doing that no one at Sun > expected to be done, and users who relied on Sun didn't expect to be > done.
There are questions that the PG core needs help with and which IP lawyers are needed to answer. There are also business questions, because sure, even if a patent owner makes an acceptable grant, how fast and cheaply you could get a lawsuit by them dismissed on the basis of that grant is a business consideration. We, the non-lawyer PG community, can give input such as that which I've contributed: - I won't read/modify source code involving patents whose grants are not as wide as X - the PG core needs advice from IP lawyers - patents placed in the public domain surely are safe for PG - there must be patent grant language acceptable to PG Just merely "but they could do something bad!" from us non-lawyers is not very good advice. Already PG incurs the risk that its contributors could act in bad faith. For example, a contributor's employer might sue PG under copyright and/or trade secrecy law claiming the contribution was not authorized (this is why some open source projects require contributor agreements). Nico --