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Re: Oracle Innobase Purchase Impacts MySQL.

From: Serge Rielau <srielau_at_ca.ibm.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 21:38:51 -0400
Message-ID: <3rj21kFjqfkhU1@individual.net>


Joel Garry wrote:

>>the first MVCC patent I saw was from 1995,

>
>
> Note again, the search criteria may simply not pick it up. If you
> search on MVCC, you get a bunch of OT stuff. I've seen others with
> slightly different search criteria. You also need to check every
> patent reference in all those shown, and that still isn't even close to
> a patent search - says right on it nothing before 1976. But I was
> merely pointing out something that Paul said would surprise him.
Yes, anyone digging seriously through this would have a good time.
>>Patents do not get granted in retrospect.

> Once the courts get involved, anything can happen.
> http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050925/news_mz1j25gould.html
A well, but note how all this happened in 1956, 1957. A very short time frame. The rest is the length of the dispute. What you have here is a fight over "prior art". Someone filed for a patent on something someone else claimed to have already described.

> There's a whole little industry built on things like retrospective
> patent suits.

No doubt about it. ;-)

>>You can't today patent that idea you blurted out 2 years ago at the
>>x-mas party when you were drunk.

> Guess you've never been to a biosciences party :-)
Having studied at a Technical University (300 CS students/semester including 12 females) biosciences parties were the next best thing to architecture parties.
http://www.uni-kl.de/wcms/webcam.html
Maybe times have changed, but patents were never on my mind....

Cheers
Serge

-- 
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab
Received on Mon Oct 17 2005 - 20:38:51 CDT

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