Re: pg_rewind, a tool for resynchronizing an old master after failover

On 23.05.2013 08:03, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On 23 May 2013 12:10, Heikki Linnakangas<hlinnakangas(at)vmware(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Please take a look: https://github.com/vmware/pg_rewind
>
> The COPYRIGHT file shows that VMware is claiming copyright on unstated
> parts of the code for this. As such, its not a normal submission to
> the PostgreSQL project, which involves placing copyright with the
> PGDG.

We have a lot of code in PostgreSQL source tree with different copyright
notices, and there's no problem with that as long as the coe is licensed
under the PostgreSQL license. For patches that add or modify code in
PostgreSQL, we generally have copyright notices with just PGDG, to avoid
having a long list of copyright notices of a lot of companies and
individuals on every file. I'm no lawyer, but I believe there's no
difference from the legal point of view.

> As a result, while it sounds interesting, people should be aware of
> that and I suggest we shouldn't discuss that code on this list, to
> avoid any disputes should we decide to include a similar facility in
> core Postgres in the future.

That's just paranoia. There are a lot of tools out there on pgfoundry,
with various copyright holders and even difference licenses, and it's
fine to talk about all those on this list. Besides, the code is licensed
under the PostgreSQL license, so if someone decides we should have this
e.g in contrib, you can just grab the sources and commit. Thirdly,
there's no reason to refrain from even discussing this, even if someone
would include a similar facility in core Postgres - this is about
copyrights, not patents (and yes, this contribution has been cleared by
VMware legal department; VMware doesn't hold any patents on this)

- Heikki