Ühel kenal päeval (esmaspäev, 17. jaanuar 2005, 11:57-0800), kirjutas
Joshua D. Drake:
> >However, I don't want to be beholden to IBM indefinitely --- in five
> >years their corporate strategy might change. I think that a reasonable
> >response to this is to plan to get rid of ARC, or at least modify the
> >code enough to avoid the patent, in time for 8.1. (It's entirely likely
> >that that will happen before the patent issues, anyway.)
> >
> > regards, tom lane
> >
> >
> IBM makes 20% of their money from licensing patents.
OTOH they make >80% of their goodwill in OS community out of being nice
to opensource projects. Or at least avoiding being seen as downright
unfair. So I expect at least some civility from them if and when thei
get the patent.
I'm also suspect that PG "possibly infringes" on enough already granted
patents (some likely owned by IBM) to at least get it into as much
trouble as SCO has caused to IBM.
The reason we havent seen any IBM lawyers is that demanding royalties
from "PostgreSQL Global Development Group" would be bad publicity, not
thet they could not have done it if PG were a product of "Mom&Pop
Software Startup Co".
What comes to companies that take PG source, rebrand it and sell as
closed-source product, then they have several options :1) just wait and hope that the public version evolves past ARC
patent before the patent is granted.2) licence the patent from IBM, if and when it is granted3) rewrite the part that
usesARC (and if they're really paranoid, then parts bordering it) in their commercial version.4) hire some core
developersto do 3) in the public version
--
Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>