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

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:00 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> This is a killer point here- clearly the people who have been
> contributing to PG aren't going to complain about their contributions
> being released as part of some other work which has a different license
> or they'd have gone after the many, many, many closed-source and
> proprietary and commercial forks of PG.

Yes. Tom's argument doesn't work at all, for this reason among
others. Other projects have done things like this, I'm pretty sure,
so we could, too.

> I have to say that I do like the idea of the explicit patent grant which
> is included in the Apache 2 license. I'm a bit concerned about how it's
> just a heck of a lot more text for some, but I doubt there's a simpler
> way to get there with a license that's been actually reviewed by modern
> lawyers and which covers what we'd like.

I agree. The argument that is being made by Tom, Bruce, Dave, and
David Fetter -- not to conflate them all, but they seem to be broadly
on the same wavelength -- is that we should just reject contributions
if the contributor says that there is a patent on anything in that
contribution, or if we find out that this is the case. Then, they
allege, we will have no problem with patents. I am not a lawyer, but
I don't think it works that way. Even if PostgreSQL never accepts a
contribution that is known to be covered by a patent, somebody can
still find something in there that they think is covered by some
patent they own and start suing people. The point of the Apache 2
license (and similar ones) is to make that sort of thing less likely
to happen and less likely to be successful. It is not bullet-proof,
of course, but it is intended to help.

Saying "as long as we don't handle any patents we won't have any
trouble with patents" is roughly as credible as the same sentence
would be if you replaced "patents" with "nuclear weapons" or "knives"
or "guns" or "toxic waste".

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company