On 2013-06-14 21:56:52 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I don't think we need it. I think what we need is to decide is which
> algorithm is legally OK to use. And then put it in.
>
> In the past, we've had a great deal of speculation about that legal
> question from people who are not lawyers. Maybe it would be valuable
> to get some opinions from people who ARE lawyers. Tom and Heikki both
> work for real big companies which, I'm guessing, have substantial
> legal departments; perhaps they could pursue getting the algorithms of
> possible interest vetted. Or, I could try to find out whether it's
> possible do something similar through EnterpriseDB.
I personally don't think the legal arguments holds all that much water
for snappy and lz4. But then the opinion of a european non-lawyer doesn't
hold much either.
Both are widely used by a large number open and closed projects, some of
which have patent grant clauses in their licenses. E.g. hadoop,
cassandra use lz4, and I'd be surprised if the companies behind those
have opened themselves to litigation.
I think we should preliminarily decide which algorithm to use before we
get lawyers involved. I'd surprised if they can make such a analysis
faster than we can rule out one of them via benchmarks.
Will post an updated patch that includes lz4 as well.
Greetings,
Andres Freund
-- Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training &
Services