Tom Lane wrote: > Neil Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 18:43 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > >> I have already > >> suggested to core that we should insist on 8.1 not requiring an initdb, > >> so as to ensure that people will migrate up to it easily from 8.0. > > > So is it firm policy that changes that require a catversion update > > cannot be made during the 8.1 cycle? > > Not yet --- I suggested it but didn't get any yeas or nays. I don't > feel this is solely core's decision anyway ... what do the assembled > hackers think?
I am not in favor of adjusting the 8.1 release based solely on this patent issue. I think the probability of the patent being accepted and enforced against anyone using PostgreSQL to be very unlikely. I would also like to come up with a procedure that would scale to any other patent problems we might have. What if someone finds another patent problem during 8.1 beta? Do we shorten the 8.2 development cycle too? What I would like to do is to pledge that we will put out an 8.0.X to address any patent conflict experienced by our users. This would include ARC or anything else. This way we don't focus just on ARC but have a plan for any patent issues that appear, and we don't have to adjust our development cycle until an actual threat appears. One advantage we have is that we can easily adjust our code to work around patented code by just installing a new binary. (Patents that affect our storage format would be more difficult. A fix would have to perhaps rewrite the on-disk data.) One problem in working around the GIF format patent is that you had to create a file that was readable by many of the existing GIF readers. With PostgreSQL, only we read our own data files so we can more easily make adjustments to avoid patents. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]