Re: ARC patent

Dave Held wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Marian POPESCU [mailto:softexpert@libertysurf.fr]
> > Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 8:06 AM
> > To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
> > Subject: Re: [HACKERS] ARC patent
> > 
> > >>>Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>>FYI, IBM has applied for a patent on ARC (AFAICS the 
> > >>>>patent application is still pending, although the USPTO
> > >>>>site is a little hard to grok):
> > >>>
> > >>>Ugh.  We could hope that the patent wouldn't be granted, 
> > >>>but I think it unlikely, unless Jan is aware of prior art
> > >>>(like a publication predating the filing date).  I fear we'll
> > >>>have to change or remove that code.
> 
> Why not just ask IBM for a free license first?  After all, they put 
> 1,000+ patents in the public domain or something, didn't they?  I 
> realize that they might use this technology in DB2, and don't want
> to encourage competitors.  But IBM seems a lot more friendly to OSS
> than most companies, and it doesn't seem like it would hurt to ask.
> At the worst they say "no" and you just proceed as you would have
> originally.

The problem is that they would have to license all commercial,
closed-source distributions of PostgreSQL too, and I doubt they would do
that.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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