Re: Patent issues and 8.1

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> 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?

No, as an 8.0.x is mean to be for minor changes/fixes/improvements ... 
'addressing a patnt conflict', at least in ARC's case, is a major change, 
which is why we are looking at a short dev cycle for 8.1 ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664