Robert Treat wrote:
> I find it hard to believe that no one in the community has the
> resources to pull this off. Heck I know a couple of people who know
> people at IBM that probably could have pointed me in the right
> direction.
The only acceptable solutions for this issue would have been IBM
withdrawing the patent application or IBM making a legally binding
deposition that they grant a no-strings-attached patent license to
everyone. Neither of these things have the remotest chance of
happening. Neither IBM making this the 501st patent available for free
use by the open-source community nor IBM granting a patent license to
the PostgreSQL project nor IBM saying "don't worry about it" would have
been acceptable. So removing the code was the reasonable way to
resolve this on our part.
Additionally, this sends out a message that the PostgreSQL project is
not interested in compromising on the software patent issue. I'm very
happy to send that message, and I wish that article would get
syndicated to all the corners of the web.
--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/