Re: Patent issues and 8.1

On 1/25/2005 6:23 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
>> pgman wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>
>> I did not see any reaction to my ideas above. Is this a good plan?
>
> No, as an 8.0.x is mean to be for minor changes/fixes/improvements ...
> 'addressing a patnt conflict', at least in ARC's case, is a major change,
> which is why we are looking at a short dev cycle for 8.1 ...

Then we better make sure that 8.0 -> 8.1 does not require dump&reload.
However unlikely we judge the patent problem to actually bite people, we
cannot force 8.0.x users into a dump&reload upgrade by not providing a
backport when it happens.

Jan

>
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