Joel Garry wrote:
>>Patents for MVCC? That would indeed suprise me.
>
>
> Go to www.uspto.gov, search patents for "multi version concurrency
> control".
>
> Note that search is not exhaustive - if there are military apps,
> patents might be secret, and some might simply not be in the system.
>
> jg
> --
> @home.com is bogus.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#Term_of_patent
>
Software Patents need to be submitted in the US within one year after
the product is publically available. Give it 3 years to get a patent
issues (which is on the conservative side).
So when was Oracle 4 shipped? Any patent issued, say 4 years or later
will be only be valid w.r.t. algorithms introduced at the time or later
(i.e. improvements). So, without having read through the patents in
detail, the first MVCC patent I saw was from 1995, so anything MVCC
available in Oracle 1991 (there is likely a way to get the submission
date) would pretty much be up for grabs for these technical reasons.
Patents do not get granted in retrospect.
You can't today patent that idea you blurted out 2 years ago at the
x-mas party when you were drunk.
Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab
Received on Mon Oct 17 2005 - 14:47:17 CDT
