Re: Patent issues and 8.1 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Neil Conway
Subject Re: Patent issues and 8.1
Date
Msg-id 41F71EDD.9090705@samurai.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Patent issues and 8.1  (Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Patent issues and 8.1  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Re: Patent issues and 8.1  (Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>)
List pgsql-hackers
Bruce Momjian wrote:
> So if we have to address it we call it 8.0.7 or something.  My point is
> that we don't need to address it until we actually find out the patent
> is being enforced against someone, and that possibility is quite unlikely.

IMHO, the patent issue is *not* a "potential problem" for a lot of 
people, it *is* a problem -- it makes people uncomfortable to be 
deploying software that they know might cause them legal headaches down 
the line. It also makes life difficult for people distributing 
commercial versions of PostgreSQL.

I've posted a patch to -patches that replaces ARC with LRU. The patch is 
stable -- I'll post some code cleanup for it tomorrow, but I've yet to 
find any bugs despite a fair bit of testing. The patch also reverts the 
code to being quite close to 7.4, which is another reason to have some 
confidence in its correctness.

I think the best solution is to replace ARC with LRU in 8.0.1 or 8.0.2, 
and develop a better replacement policy during the 8.1 development cycle.

-Neil


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