Re: Patent warning about the Greenplum source code

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 09:56:48AM +0100, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I don't really want to discuss patent issues publically.

While we don't want to discuss patented ideas, the patent terms are an
imporant topic here.

> On 2015-10-30 04:47:35 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > However, while the license defines and uses "Derivative Works", it does
> > not mention that in the patent grant clause.  I assume this means that
> > patent grants do not apply to derived works, meaning if code or ideas
> > were moved from Greenplum to Postgres (which is not Apache 2.0
> > licensed), it would not have a patent grant. I talked to Greenplum staff
> > about this a few months ago and they did not dispute my analysis.
> 
> The easiest thing would be to dual-licensce the code such contributions
> to postgres. That sounds quite possible to me.

Yes, but once they get contributions from outside, that is much harder to
add.

> > Therefore, I caution people from viewing the Greenplum source code as
> > you might see patented ideas that could be later implemented in
> > Postgres, opening Postgres up to increased patent violation problems.  I
> > am also concerned about existing community members who work for
> > Pivotal/Greenplum and therefore are required to view the patented source
> > code.
> 
> Issues around this are much larger than patents. Any contribution done
> under employment has such risks. That's why the kernel has the
> signed-off-policy.
> 
> Check the section about signed-off-by in
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
> and simpler
> https://ltsi.linuxfoundation.org/developers/signed-process

Yes, this does expose a missing part of our existing process.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com

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