Re: How can we submit code patches that implement our (pending) patents?

On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:55:01AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:40:41AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 08:19:35AM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> > > I'm fairly sure that I'm right. But my point isn't that we should "trust
> > > Andres implicitly ™" (although that's obviously not a bad starting point
> > > ;)). But rather, given that that is a reasonable assumption that such
> > > agreements are legally possible, we can decide whether we want to take
> > > advantage of such terms *assuming they are legally sound*. Then, if, and
> > > only if, we decide that that's interesting from a policy POV, we can
> > > verify those assumptions with lawyers.
> >
> > >
> > > Given we're far from the first project dealing with this, and that
> > > companies that have shown themselves to be reasonably trustworthy around
> > > open source, like Red Hat, assuming that such agreements are sound seems
> > > quite reasonable.
> >
> > Sun Microsystems seemed reasonably trustworthy too.
>
> I realize what you are saying is that at the time Red Hat wrote that,
> they had good intentions, but they might not be able to control its
> behavior in a bankruptcy, so didn't mention it. Also, Oracle is suing
> Google over the Java API:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.
>
> which I can't imagine Sun doing, but legally Oracle can now that they
> own Java via Sun. Of course, Sun might not have realized the problem,
> and Red Hat might have, but that's also assuming that there aren't other
> problems that Red Hat doesn't know about.

That's not about patents though, is it.

(I do believe that case is highly contrived. Sun put Java under the
GPL, so presumably Google can fork it under those terms. I've not
followed that case, so I don't really know what's up with it or why it
wasn't just dismissed with prejudice.)

Nico
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