Re: pluggable compression support

On 06/25/2013 12:23 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
>> However, can you tell me what exactly you are concerned about? lz4 is
>> under the BSD license, and released by Google.  Why are we worried, exactly?
> 
> Patents.  The license on the code doesn't matter --- worst case, if
> someone objected, we could rewrite the algorithm ourselves to get out
> of an alleged copyright violation.  But if someone comes after us for
> a patent violation we're screwed; or at least, our users who have
> terabytes of data stored with an infringing algorithm are screwed.

Taking this off-list, because it is a legal matter.  Particularly, it's
legally problematic to discuss patents on a public mailing list, as we
found out with the ARC patent.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com