Re: ARC patent

Tom Lane wrote:
> Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> writes:
> > On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 18:43 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> I have already
> >> suggested to core that we should insist on 8.1 not requiring an initdb,
> >> so as to ensure that people will migrate up to it easily from 8.0.
>
> > So is it firm policy that changes that require a catversion update
> > cannot be made during the 8.1 cycle?
>
> Not yet --- I suggested it but didn't get any yeas or nays. I don't
> feel this is solely core's decision anyway ... what do the assembled
> hackers think?

I am not in favor of adjusting the 8.1 release based solely on this
patent issue. I think the probability of the patent being accepted and
enforced against anyone using PostgreSQL to be very unlikely. I would
also like to come up with a procedure that would scale to any other
patent problems we might have. What if someone finds another patent
problem during 8.1 beta? Do we shorten the 8.2 development cycle too?

What I would like to do is to pledge that we will put out an 8.0.X to
address any patent conflict experienced by our users. This would
include ARC or anything else. This way we don't focus just on ARC but
have a plan for any patent issues that appear, and we don't have to
adjust our development cycle until an actual threat appears.

One advantage we have is that we can easily adjust our code to work
around patented code by just installing a new binary. (Patents that
affect our storage format would be more difficult. A fix would have to
perhaps rewrite the on-disk data.)

One problem in working around the GIF format patent is that you had to
create a file that was readable by many of the existing GIF readers.
With PostgreSQL, only we read our own data files so we can more easily
make adjustments to avoid patents.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
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