On 1/25/2005 6:23 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Bruce Momjian wrote:
pgman wrote:Not yet --- I suggested it but didn't get any yeas or nays. I don't feel this is solely core's decision anyway ... what do the assembled hackers think?
I am not in favor of adjusting the 8.1 release based solely on this patent issue. I think the probability of the patent being accepted and enforced against anyone using PostgreSQL to be very unlikely. I would also like to come up with a procedure that would scale to any other patent problems we might have. What if someone finds another patent problem during 8.1 beta? Do we shorten the 8.2 development cycle too?
What I would like to do is to pledge that we will put out an 8.0.X to address any patent conflict experienced by our users. This would include ARC or anything else. This way we don't focus just on ARC but have a plan for any patent issues that appear, and we don't have to adjust our development cycle until an actual threat appears.
One advantage we have is that we can easily adjust our code to work around patented code by just installing a new binary. (Patents that affect our storage format would be more difficult. A fix would have to perhaps rewrite the on-disk data.)
One problem in working around the GIF format patent is that you had to create a file that was readable by many of the existing GIF readers. With PostgreSQL, only we read our own data files so we can more easily make adjustments to avoid patents.
I did not see any reaction to my ideas above. Is this a good plan?
No, as an 8.0.x is mean to be for minor changes/fixes/improvements ... 'addressing a patnt conflict', at least in ARC's case, is a major change, which is why we are looking at a short dev cycle for 8.1 ...
Then we better make sure that 8.0 -> 8.1 does not require dump&reload. However unlikely we judge the patent problem to actually bite people, we cannot force 8.0.x users into a dump&reload upgrade by not providing a backport when it happens.
Jan
---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
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