pgman wrote: > > 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.
I did not see any reaction to my ideas above. Is this a good plan? -- 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 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
