Anyone see this little news item? It showed up in my
paper copy of InfoWorld today.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/02/14/000214hnpatent.xml

It caught my eye, and I'm forwarding it here, since Informix's Universal
DB now incorporates the old Illustra code. Since stepping on patents
has always been one of the open source software nightmare scenarios,
it's be nice to know which patents are involved.

(BTW, I was checking out Informix's DataBlade technology: turns out it's
just like pgsql's user extensible types and functions, with pretty PR
and training tools - and a little better integration packaging. The basic
API is so similar, I woudn't be suprised if it's a direct descendant)

Ross
-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005



Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:39:57 -0600
"Ross J. Reedstrom" <reedstrm@wallace.ece.rice.edu>
IBM sues Informix over DB patents
"Ross J. Reedstrom" wrote:
> 
> Anyone see this little news item? It showed up in my
> paper copy of InfoWorld today.
> 
> http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/02/14/000214hnpatent.xml
> 
> It caught my eye, and I'm forwarding it here, since Informix's Universal
> DB now incorporates the old Illustra code. Since stepping on patents
> has always been one of the open source software nightmare scenarios,
> it's be nice to know which patents are involved.
> 
> (BTW, I was checking out Informix's DataBlade technology: turns out it's
> just like pgsql's user extensible types and functions, with pretty PR
> and training tools - and a little better integration packaging. The basic
> API is so similar, I woudn't be suprised if it's a direct descendant)

It very likely is, as Illustra (which introduced the name DataBlades) was 
a direct descendant of old Postgres 4.2. 

They moved independantly from postquel to SQL but the engine they 
started from was the same.

------------------
Hannu

Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:44:15 +0200
Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>
Re: [HACKERS] IBM sues Informix over DB patents