"Ross J. Reedstrom" wrote:
>
> Anyone see this little news item? It showed up in my
> paper copy of InfoWorld today.
>
> http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/02/14/000214hnpatent.xml
>
> It caught my eye, and I'm forwarding it here, since Informix's Universal
> DB now incorporates the old Illustra code. Since stepping on patents
> has always been one of the open source software nightmare scenarios,
> it's be nice to know which patents are involved.
>
> (BTW, I was checking out Informix's DataBlade technology: turns out it's
> just like pgsql's user extensible types and functions, with pretty PR
> and training tools - and a little better integration packaging. The basic
> API is so similar, I woudn't be suprised if it's a direct descendant)
It very likely is, as Illustra (which introduced the name DataBlades) was
a direct descendant of old Postgres 4.2.
They moved independantly from postquel to SQL but the engine they
started from was the same.
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Hannu