On Thursday 14 April 2005 15:56, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> > I find it hard to believe that no one in the community has the
> > resources to pull this off. Heck I know a couple of people who know
> > people at IBM that probably could have pointed me in the right
> > direction.
>
> The only acceptable solutions for this issue would have been IBM
> withdrawing the patent application or IBM making a legally binding
> deposition that they grant a no-strings-attached patent license to
> everyone. Neither of these things have the remotest chance of
> happening. Neither IBM making this the 501st patent available for free
> use by the open-source community nor IBM granting a patent license to
> the PostgreSQL project nor IBM saying "don't worry about it" would have
> been acceptable. So removing the code was the reasonable way to
> resolve this on our part.
>
I believe there is at least the chance that IBM would have stated publicly
they had no intention of enforcing the patent. Again, I don't know if they
have done that before, but other companies have, and the good will gained
from such a gesture to the open source community would have been huge.
> Additionally, this sends out a message that the PostgreSQL project is
> not interested in compromising on the software patent issue. I'm very
> happy to send that message, and I wish that article would get
> syndicated to all the corners of the web.
>
I think it's good press for us too, but given that we couldn't even muster
enough support to put the no patents banner on the web site I think your
over-reaching here a bit.
--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL
