Re: Patent warning about the Greenplum source code

On 11/01/2015 06:37 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Let me add that this is more than hypothetical. While we don't think
> any of these companies would sue the community for patent infringement,
> they could sue users, and the company could be bought by a sinister
> company that could enforce those patents. For example, few had problems
> with Sun's control over Java,

You only say this because you're not part of the Java world. LOTS of
people had issues with Sun's control over Java; some of them even went
to court.

> but when Oracle bought Sun, more people
> were concerned. Someone could buy the company _just_ to sue for patent
> infringement --- happens all the time.

Not as often as you'd think, and it hasn't happened in the database
world yet, for some good reasons. This is all besides the point,
though; PostgreSQL has been accepting contributions from patent-holding
companies for over a decade, and that doesn't seem likely to stop any
time soon. Greenplum is not in any way special, especially since we
already accepted contributions from Greenplum Inc. back in 2005-2006.

Overall, this thread seems designed to kick up a lot of fuss with no
potential useful outcome. How about we terminate it now?

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com