Re: ARC patent

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> There's a very recent paper at
> http://carmen.cs.uiuc.edu/~zchen9/paper/TPDS-final.ps on an alternative
> to ARC which claims superior performance ...

Personally, I'd prefer a very *old* paper ;-)

> Maybe this will give us added impetus to make the 8.1 cycle short, as
> has been suggested previously.

Agreed. If we have a plan to replace the code in three-to-six months
I think we are all right, especially seeing that this is only a pending
patent and not enforceable yet.

To those who say "you can't release with a potential patent problem"
I would say that we already have. There are lots of people running
8.0 beta and RC releases --- if history is any guide, many of them
will continue running those releases for a long time, rather than
update to final. We can never erase all trace that we ever touched
ARC (would you have us retroactively edit our CVS history?) and AFAIK
we would not be required to do so anyway. The legal requirement would
be to cure the breach going forward, ie, get it out of our future
releases. That we can and should do, but there's no need for panic.

regards, tom lane