Re: IBM patent

Oops! t.maekitalo@epgmbh.de (Tommi Maekitalo) was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> Hi,
>
> I just read about this IBM-patent-issue at www.heise.de. IBM grants
> this patens to all projects, which follow one of the licenses, which
> are approved by the open-source-initiative. And the BSD-license is
> as far as I see approved (I found "New BSD license").
>
> When releasing commercial closed-source-variants of postgresql this
> BSD-license stays intact, so the use of these patents in postgresql
> seems ok.

Actually, the latter isn't so.

If Mammoth or Pervasive or such release their own release of
PostgreSQL, nothing has historically mandated that they make that
release available under the BSD license.

Presumably acceptance of the patent would change that.

You and I might not have individual objections to this situation, but
one or another of the companies putting together PostgreSQL releases
very well might.
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