Re: ARC patent

Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>

From: Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>

To: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>

Cc: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>

Date: 2005-01-17T22:55:50Z

Lists: pgsql-hackers

On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 12:15 -0800, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> We have just admitted that we knowingly may infringe upon
> an IBM patent. That really is a different thing than,
> "We have some really smart people that came up with something,
> "like" this other technology".

The code is clear that it implements the "Adaptive Replacement Cache",
which is an algorithm proposed by IBM; the code probably references some
IBM papers on the topic -- and if not, discussions of ARC on -hackers
certainly do. I don't see how there could be any reasonable grounds for
arguing that, prior to this thread, we just "came up with something
really, really similar".

-Neil