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

On 2018-07-26 16:42:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > On 2018-07-26 09:51:54 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> There's been an awful lot of discussion in this thread that supposes that
> >> we can change the Postgres license. Let me just point out very clearly
> >> that no such thing is going to happen. There will be no changes, no
> >> additions, no alternate licenses, period. To change the license, we'd
> >> need the agreement of all current and past contributors, which is a
> >> completely impractical thing even if there were fairly wide consensus
> >> that a particular change is a good idea. Which there isn't.
>
> > That's obviously not going to happen. But there is the less crazy
> > alternative of dual licensing new contributions going forward, with a
> > licence that's TPL compatible.
>
> No, we can't do that. Past contributions were made with the expectation
> that they'd be distributed under the existing license, full stop.
> Relicensing other people's work without their permission is definitely
> lawsuit bait. (Of course, most people might be fine with it, but it
> only takes one.)

I *explicitly* said "dual licensing new contributions going forward",
note the words "new" and "forward". There's plenty reasons to not want
that, but it definitely doesn't amount to relicensing or anything in
that vein. Not that the PG license actually blocks much of that.

> I think what you're suggesting is some legalese along the lines of
> "parts of this are under license X and other parts are under license Y",
> but nobody's going to want to deal with that. As David or someone
> mentioned upthread, not having to have a discussion with your corporate
> legal department is one of the big attractions of Postgres. Furthermore,
> there would be an awfully strong argument to be made that the net effect
> of such a thing would be that the whole of Postgres is effectively now
> under the double license --- because who could make use of only the
> old-license part, especially after a few years of mixing? So anyone who
> wasn't happy about their work being relicensed would still have solid
> grounds to sue.

Where would that ground come from if the license is BSD / TPL
compatible? Unless we somehow stopped keeping the file headers intact,
there'd be absolutely nothing in the TPL that'd not still be correct?
Have these people sued the forks of PG? No.

Again, the idea here wasn't to have some crazy license, but to dual
license new contributions under something like Apache 2 & TPL. The only
meaningful difference is that Apache 2 has an explicit (rather than the
theorized implicit grant in BSD / TPL) patent grant for the
contribution.

Greetings,

Andres Freund