Re: lztext and compression ratios...

JanWieck(at)t-online(dot)de (Jan Wieck) writes:
> One thing to keep in mind is that the LZ algorithm you're
> thinking of must be distributable under the terms of the BSD
> license. If it's copyrighted or patented by any third party,
> not agreeing to these terms, it's out of discussion and will
> never appear in the Postgres source tree. Especially the LZ
> algorithm used in GIF is one of these show-stoppers.

As long as you brought it up: how sure are you that the method you've
used is not subject to any patents? The mere fact that you learned
it from someone who didn't patent it does not guarantee anything ---
someone else could have invented it independently and filed for a
patent.

If you can show that this method uses no ideas not found in zlib,
then I'll feel reassured --- a good deal of legal research went into
zlib to make sure it didn't fall foul of any patents, and zlib has
now been around long enough that it'd be tough for anyone to get a
new patent on one of its techniques. But if SLZ has any additional
ideas in it, then we could be in trouble. There are an awful lot of
compression patents.

regards, tom lane