On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 09:56:48AM +0100, Andres Freund wrote: > Hi, > > I don't really want to discuss patent issues publically.
While we don't want to discuss patented ideas, the patent terms are an imporant topic here. > On 2015-10-30 04:47:35 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote: > > However, while the license defines and uses "Derivative Works", it does > > not mention that in the patent grant clause. I assume this means that > > patent grants do not apply to derived works, meaning if code or ideas > > were moved from Greenplum to Postgres (which is not Apache 2.0 > > licensed), it would not have a patent grant. I talked to Greenplum staff > > about this a few months ago and they did not dispute my analysis. > > The easiest thing would be to dual-licensce the code such contributions > to postgres. That sounds quite possible to me. Yes, but once they get contributions from outside, that is much harder to add. > > Therefore, I caution people from viewing the Greenplum source code as > > you might see patented ideas that could be later implemented in > > Postgres, opening Postgres up to increased patent violation problems. I > > am also concerned about existing community members who work for > > Pivotal/Greenplum and therefore are required to view the patented source > > code. > > Issues around this are much larger than patents. Any contribution done > under employment has such risks. That's why the kernel has the > signed-off-policy. > > Check the section about signed-off-by in > https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches > and simpler > https://ltsi.linuxfoundation.org/developers/signed-process Yes, this does expose a missing part of our existing process. -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + As you are, so once was I. As I am, so you will be. + + Roman grave inscription + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
