Tom Lane wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jan Wieck) writes: > > One thing to keep in mind is that the LZ algorithm you're > > thinking of must be distributable under the terms of the BSD > > license. If it's copyrighted or patented by any third party, > > not agreeing to these terms, it's out of discussion and will > > never appear in the Postgres source tree. Especially the LZ > > algorithm used in GIF is one of these show-stoppers. > > As long as you brought it up: how sure are you that the method you've > used is not subject to any patents? The mere fact that you learned > it from someone who didn't patent it does not guarantee anything --- > someone else could have invented it independently and filed for a > patent. Now that you ask for it: I'm not sure. Could be. > If you can show that this method uses no ideas not found in zlib, > then I'll feel reassured --- a good deal of legal research went into > zlib to make sure it didn't fall foul of any patents, and zlib has > now been around long enough that it'd be tough for anyone to get a > new patent on one of its techniques. But if SLZ has any additional > ideas in it, then we could be in trouble. There are an awful lot of > compression patents. To do so I don't know enough about the algorithms used in zlib. Is there someone out here who could verify that if I detailed enough describe what our compression code does? Jan -- #======================================================================# # It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. # # Let's break this rule - forgive me. # #================================================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] #