On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 12:55:25PM +0900, Ist Conne wrote: > So, It is difficult problem. > Do we have not Workaround?
I am not a lawyer either but I would recommend at some point that you leave patent issues aside. If you really care about them, then you'll quickly need to find another job : *everything* in IT is patented. I really mean *everything*. Right now you can't write a 20-line piece of code which does not infringe on a patent you don't know about. Whatever the LB you'll use, you should not use Linux to host it since it's said to infringe a large number of patents from many companies too. The problem with patents is that any obvious improvement made to a product has to be patented if you don't want your competitor to file it before you and prevent you from using it. I personally don't want to play with that (and I don't have the money nor the time either). F5 used to sue a few competitors several years ago and came to a settlement. I suspect it's just because they need to protect their patents if they don't want to lose them. I'm not aware of them being aggressive in this area. After all, they're using a log of open source and running Linux in their products too :-) Also, I'd say that their patent covers network devices, possibly those processing contents at the packet level. Haproxy does that as a proxy server and strictly applies exactly what cookies were made for : have a server send a location information to a client so that when the client brings that information back, the server knows where to look it up. Many application servers were already using cookies that way long before the patent filing. Last, if you're still scared, you might consider using haproxy's cookie prefix mode which has a number of advantages in some circumstances, and is not covered by the patent. Once again, I'm a software developer/designer, call me as you want, but I'm not a lawyer. It's not my job and I have no skills there. So your concerns should be addressed to a lawyer, or better, in doubt don't use any software that is not certified 100% patent-safe (which probably means don't use any software at all). Regards, Willy
