| From: | Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> |
|---|---|
| To: | Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> |
| Cc: | Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org, Hitoshi Harada <umi(dot)tanuki(at)gmail(dot)com> |
| Subject: | Re: pluggable compression support |
| Date: | 2013-06-25 19:23:02 |
| Message-ID: | 14817.1372188182@sss.pgh.pa.us |
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| Lists: | pgsql-hackers |
Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> However, can you tell me what exactly you are concerned about? lz4 is
> under the BSD license, and released by Google. Why are we worried, exactly?
Patents. The license on the code doesn't matter --- worst case, if
someone objected, we could rewrite the algorithm ourselves to get out
of an alleged copyright violation. But if someone comes after us for
a patent violation we're screwed; or at least, our users who have
terabytes of data stored with an infringing algorithm are screwed.
Andres is right that we're paying closer attention to patent risks here
than we do most places. That's because we know that the whole arena
of data compression is a minefield of patents. It would be
irresponsible not to try to check.
regards, tom lane
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