This may have the nice side effect of pushing 'possibly patented' technologies into the FOSS realm, but again I wonder what the duration/persistence of Oracle's committment is?
I think I will ask our lawyers to review this. - Luke Msg is shrt cuz m on ma treo -----Original Message----- From: Tom Lane [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2007 02:55 PM Eastern Standard Time To: Alvaro Herrera Cc: Luke Lonergan; Bruce Momjian; PostgreSQL-development Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Oracle indemnifies PostgreSQL on its patents Alvaro Herrera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I would be worried if I were you (or Joshua Drake for that matter): does > the agreement apply to commercial companies deriving products from > PostgreSQL as well? Interesting point. It's doubtless unwise to take this press release as being an accurate guide to the terms of the license, but what it says is : According to the terms of the OIN license, the components covered by : the agreement include not only the Linux kernel and associated GNU : applications, but also other open source projects included in Linux : distributions. which to me says you're covered as long as your code is commonly included in Linux distributions. Hence, proprietary derivatives would *not* be covered. I'd guess that Oracle would have a hard time suing for any patent violation embedded in the freely distributed Postgres code, but any technique appearing only in the proprietary extension would still be at risk. IANAL, etc. I assume that EDB and Greenplum will have their lawyers scrutinizing this deal on Monday morning ;-) ... I'd be interested to hear what the experts' conclusion is. regards, tom lane
