Re: IBM patent

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 
> >Actually, the latter isn't so.
> >
> >If Mammoth or Pervasive or such release their own release of
> >PostgreSQL, nothing has historically mandated that they make that
> >release available under the BSD license.
> >
> >Presumably acceptance of the patent would change that.
> >
> >You and I might not have individual objections to this situation, but
> >one or another of the companies putting together PostgreSQL releases
> >very well might.
> 
> But, there is nothing stop'ng them from replacing the ARC code with
> their own variant though ...

Not only that, I'd go further and say that they have a duty to either
do that or pay someone to do it.  They are, after all, the entities
that probably care about the situation the most.

This type of situation seems to me to be one that has to be examined
from a "greatest good" point of view.  If IBM were to allow all open
source projects to make free use of a patent (thus exposing only those
entities which sell commercial versions under a non-open-source
license to risk), then the PG group might be faced with the tradeoff
of using a superior but patented (though free for open source use)
algorithm, or using a possibly inferior but unencumbered one.  I'd
wager that the vast majority of PostgreSQL users received their copy
via the open source license.  Unless the encumbered algorithm is not
significantly superior to the unencumbered one, the "greater good" is
likely to be to make use of the patented algorithm and force the
non-open-source vendors to deal with removing the algorithm
themselves.


None of that really applies to the specific situation we're
discussing, however: the current ARC implementation is apparently not
showing itself to be a clearly superior approach, so some other
approach is probably warranted.


-- 
Kevin Brown                          kevin@sysexperts.com