On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 09:56:48AM +0100, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't really want to discuss patent issues publically.
While we don't want to discuss patented ideas, the patent terms are an
imporant topic here.
> On 2015-10-30 04:47:35 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > However, while the license defines and uses "Derivative Works", it does
> > not mention that in the patent grant clause. I assume this means that
> > patent grants do not apply to derived works, meaning if code or ideas
> > were moved from Greenplum to Postgres (which is not Apache 2.0
> > licensed), it would not have a patent grant. I talked to Greenplum staff
> > about this a few months ago and they did not dispute my analysis.
>
> The easiest thing would be to dual-licensce the code such contributions
> to postgres. That sounds quite possible to me.
Yes, but once they get contributions from outside, that is much harder to
add.
> > Therefore, I caution people from viewing the Greenplum source code as
> > you might see patented ideas that could be later implemented in
> > Postgres, opening Postgres up to increased patent violation problems. I
> > am also concerned about existing community members who work for
> > Pivotal/Greenplum and therefore are required to view the patented source
> > code.
>
> Issues around this are much larger than patents. Any contribution done
> under employment has such risks. That's why the kernel has the
> signed-off-policy.
>
> Check the section about signed-off-by in
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches
> and simpler
> https://ltsi.linuxfoundation.org/developers/signed-process
Yes, this does expose a missing part of our existing process.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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