Re: Patent issues and 8.1

On 1/25/2005 6:23 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
>> pgman wrote:
>>>> Not yet --- I suggested it but didn't get any yeas or nays.  I don't
>>>> feel this is solely core's decision anyway ... what do the assembled
>>>> hackers think?
>>>
>>> I am not in favor of adjusting the 8.1 release based solely on this
>>> patent issue.  I think the probability of the patent being accepted and
>>> enforced against anyone using PostgreSQL to be very unlikely.  I would
>>> also like to come up with a procedure that would scale to any other
>>> patent problems we might have.  What if someone finds another patent
>>> problem during 8.1 beta?  Do we shorten the 8.2 development cycle too?
>>>
>>> What I would like to do is to pledge that we will put out an 8.0.X to
>>> address any patent conflict experienced by our users.  This would
>>> include ARC or anything else.  This way we don't focus just on ARC but
>>> have a plan for any patent issues that appear, and we don't have to
>>> adjust our development cycle until an actual threat appears.
>>>
>>> One advantage we have is that we can easily adjust our code to work
>>> around patented code by just installing a new binary.  (Patents that
>>> affect our storage format would be more difficult.  A fix would have to
>>> perhaps rewrite the on-disk data.)
>>>
>>> One problem in working around the GIF format patent is that you had to
>>> create a file that was readable by many of the existing GIF readers.
>>> With PostgreSQL, only we read our own data files so we can more easily
>>> make adjustments to avoid patents.
>>
>> I did not see any reaction to my ideas above.  Is this a good plan?
> 
> No, as an 8.0.x is mean to be for minor changes/fixes/improvements ... 
> 'addressing a patnt conflict', at least in ARC's case, is a major change, 
> which is why we are looking at a short dev cycle for 8.1 ...

Then we better make sure that 8.0 -> 8.1 does not require dump&reload. 
However unlikely we judge the patent problem to actually bite people, we 
cannot force 8.0.x users into a dump&reload upgrade by not providing a 
backport when it happens.


Jan


> 
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664
> 
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