Re: pluggable compression support

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> However, can you tell me what exactly you are concerned about? lz4 is
>> under the BSD license, and released by Google.
>
> Snappy is released/copyrighted by google. lz4 by Yann Collet.
>
> Both are under BSD licenses (3 and 2 clause variants respectively). I
> don't think we need to worry about the license.
>
>> Why are we worried, exactly?
>
> The concerns I heard about were all about patent issues.


IANAL, but patents have nothing to do with licenses. Licenses apply to
specific implementations, whereas software patents (ironically, since
they're forbidden to in general, but they do it anyway for software
patents) apply to processes. Two implementations may differ, and be
under different licenses, but the same patent may apply to both.

It's a sick state of affairs when you can implement lz4 completely
yourself and still be unclear about whether your own, clean-room
implementation is encumbered by patents or not.

A lawyer has to sift through pattent applications to know whether this
particular implementation is encumbered, and that's a very
time-consuming process (and thus very expensive).

If you can take the effort, it would be greatly beneficial I imagine.
But I think you're underestimating what those lawyers will ask for it.