Re: How can we submit code patches that implement our (pending) patents?

Hi,

On 2018-07-08 11:46:51 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2018-Jul-07, David Fetter wrote:
>
> > If they have no plans to exercise any proprietary rights, our usual
> > process where people submit things and agree to have us label them
> > with the PGDG copyright and publish them under TPL would be the
> > simplest way to accomplish it.
>
> Eh, but if the submitting company has patents, would it not be dishonest
> to publish as PGDG copyright & license with no attached patent grant?
> Some other company deriving a proprietary fork from Postgres could later
> be sued by the submitting company, because there is no legal standing
> for them to use the patented code.

Yep. And even if the original submitter has good intent, it's not
unlikely for companies to go bancrupt and their assets sold off.

> TBH I don't understand how can we dual-license the code in a manner that
> protects those proprietary forks. Can you (Andres) explain what is the
> idea?

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 grants roughly the same
rights as our license. But 3) additionally grants a patent license. That
license is *not* restricted to the code in unmodified form. By
requiring future contributions to be both under the pg license and
apache 2, downstream users, including proprietary forks, can safely use
code contributed in the future, without risk of patent mines.

There are arguments made that TPL (and BSD, MIT etc) already includes an
implicit patent grant, but while a longstanding theory, it's to my
knowledge not legally been tested.

IANAL etc.

Greetings,

Andres Freund