Re: Great

One issue that seems to have been overlooked is whether IBM could have made a prompt decision to grant (or restrict) use of the patent to PostgreSQL (and downstream distributors, embedders, and users). At the time the issue was discovered in December, the patent application had been rejected and was within the window to resubmit with modifications. I doubt whether IBM has a policy in place stating the path to follow to grant worldwide royalty free use of a piece of work that might be patented or not.

I imagine there is a person within IBM that would argue for granting access, but that person would fact a lengthy process with
- the IBM legal staff to create language granting access to something that might appear in the future
- the IBM marketing staff to find a way to claim credit and good press
- the IBM accounting staff to see whether the legal expense should be charged to marketing or engineering

All of these are valid questions from people that are looking out for IBM shareholders. They would have to answer them all *before* a yes/no decision could be taken and communicated.

Lance

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Treat [mailto:xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net]
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 10:41 AM
To: Marc G. Fournier
Cc: Joshua D. Drake; Christopher Kings-Lynne;
pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Great

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 22:52, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> > Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> >>> http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39194883,00.htm
> >>
> >>
> >> I also wonder why we never contacted IBM...
> >
> > Because it isn't relevant. Regardless of IBMs decision to be good to OSS. It
> > is better, when it is known to be patent using free.
>
> And, notice IBMs comment in the article that states that even IBM isn't
> sure what they would do in the circumstances we've detailed :(
>

I don't think it is impossible to suggest that they might have publicly
stated they would not enforce the patent against even commercial
entities who made use of it. In all honestly ARC's commercial value at
this point seems pretty limited having seen a real world implementation
that was not terribly successful.

I don't know if they have ever done that before, but other companies
have done things like that. Had we contacted them privately it would
have given them the chance to address this case, even if only off the
record.

I'll stand by cores decision here though since ARC vs. 2Q is not really
a downgrade and I agree we're probably better off to have just
side-stepped the whole thing, but I can certainly understand why some
would be confused by how things were handled.

Robert Treat
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