Tom Lane wrote:
Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
Andrew Sullivan wrote:
What will you do if the patent is granted, 8.0 is out there with the
offending code, and you get a cease-and-desist letter from IBM
demanding the removal of all offending code from the Net?
We can modify the code slightly to hopefully avoid the patent. With the
US granting patents on even obvious ideas, I would think that most large
software projects, including commercial ones, already have tons of
patent violations in their code. Does anyone think otherwise?
I think there is zero probability of being sued by IBM in the near future. They would instantly destroy the credibility and good relationships they've worked so hard to build up with the entire open source community.
However, I don't want to be beholden to IBM indefinitely --- in five years their corporate strategy might change. I think that a reasonable response to this is to plan to get rid of ARC, or at least modify the code enough to avoid the patent, in time for 8.1. (It's entirely likely that that will happen before the patent issues, anyway.)
There's a very recent paper at http://carmen.cs.uiuc.edu/~zchen9/paper/TPDS-final.ps on an alternative to ARC which claims superior performance ...
Maybe this will give us added impetus to make the 8.1 cycle short, as has been suggested previously.
cheers
andrew
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
