Re: Great

On Apr 18, 2005, at 2:10 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Robert Treat wrote:
>> On Thursday 14 April 2005 15:56, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>>
>> I believe there is at least the chance that IBM would have stated
>> publicly
>> they had no intention of enforcing the patent.  Again, I don't know
>> if they
>> have done that before, but other companies have, and the good will
>> gained
>> from such a gesture to the open source community would have been huge.
>
> IBM saying they will not enforce the patent isn't enough.  I think
> Amazon said that about their business process (a.k.a. silly) patents,
> then went on to enforce them.
>
> We would need some legal document that applied to us and companies that
> make commercial products based on PostgreSQL, and that was not going to
> happen in a timeframe we were comfortable with.

Exactly.  I'm a big proponent of BSD and the open licensing stance that
projects like PostgreSQL and OpenBSD emphasize.  If you don't guarantee
the freedoms of your users, you leave them liable to the whims of
corporations who answer to their shareholders first and foremost.  If
it wasn't for OpenBSD saying *NO* to Cisco's VRRP "open" patent, we
wouldn't be blessed with CARP.  If it wasn't for the PostgreSQL
developers saying *NO* to ARC, who knows when or how IBM might have
flexed their law team.


--
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net