Re: [HACKERS] IBM sues Informix over DB patents

"Ross J. Reedstrom" wrote:
> 
> Anyone see this little news item? It showed up in my
> paper copy of InfoWorld today.
> 
> http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/02/14/000214hnpatent.xml
> 
> It caught my eye, and I'm forwarding it here, since Informix's Universal
> DB now incorporates the old Illustra code. Since stepping on patents
> has always been one of the open source software nightmare scenarios,
> it's be nice to know which patents are involved.
> 
> (BTW, I was checking out Informix's DataBlade technology: turns out it's
> just like pgsql's user extensible types and functions, with pretty PR
> and training tools - and a little better integration packaging. The basic
> API is so similar, I woudn't be suprised if it's a direct descendant)

It very likely is, as Illustra (which introduced the name DataBlades) was 
a direct descendant of old Postgres 4.2. 

They moved independantly from postquel to SQL but the engine they 
started from was the same.

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Hannu