from the blog:
"The patent is intended as a shield, not a sword, to protect Open Source from hostile IP claims."
vs. the current license:
"IF ANY LITIGATION IS INSTITUTED AGAINST SUPABASE, INC. BY A LICENSEE OF THIS SOFTWARE, THEN THE LICENSE GRANTED TO SAID LICENSEE SHALL TERMINATE AS OF THE DATE SUCH LITIGATION IS FILED."
imho: the current wording might discourage state organisations, since even a trivial lawsuit (e.g. a minor tax delay) could terminate the licence - perhaps a narrower patent-focused clause would work better (or an OSI-approved licence?).
According to the docs, it “uses Postgres Table Access Method (TAM) to provide a pluggable storage engine for PostgreSQL. […] Pluggable Storage gives developers the ability to use different storage engines for different tables within the same database. Developers will be able to choose a storage method that is optimized for their specific needs: some tables could be configured for high transactional loads, others for analytics workloads, and still others for archiving.”
I am super bullish on OrioleDB. It really seems like the next logical progression for scaling Postgres for 99% of all databases out there. I have been following their development for a while and running benchmarks to see if their performance claims are legitimate, and so far it has been amazing
OrioleDB looks interesting but the with the storage changes, the issue will be the compatability with other extensions. pg_search (paradedb), timescale come to mind.
We have seen this issue with YugabyteDB, and their integration off RocksDB as the storage engine for postgresql.
In general China has historically taken any sort of intellectual property rights and outright theft very differently then the rest of the developed world.
That's just the path for all who do this stuff. America seems culturally to like IP (everyone saying that copyright law is paramount and LLMs should be stopped, etc.) but that's just recent history.
This is not an open source license and it's untrue to say it's an open source project when it's licensed this way.
"IF ANY LITIGATION IS INSTITUTED AGAINST SUPABASE, INC. BY A LICENSEE OF THIS SOFTWARE, THEN THE LICENSE GRANTED TO SAID LICENSEE SHALL TERMINATE AS OF THE DATE SUCH LITIGATION IS FILED."
This is a poison pill. At best the licensing is naive and blocks even customers of Supabase from using OrioleDB, at worst it's an attempt for Supabase to provide themselves unlimited indemnity through the guise of a community project. It means the moment you sue Supabase for anything. Contract dispute, IP, employment, unrelated tort you lose the license. They could lose your data and if you try do anything about it they can immediately counter sue for a license violation. Using the brand of the postgres license to slip this in is pretty wild.
OrioleDB looks like a promising project and undoubtedly an great contribution from Supabase but it's not open source or really usable by anyone with this license.
Open-sourcing a patent in the database space is rare. Do you think this signals a shift where companies will realize that open ecosystems drive adoption faster than closed IP walls?
Had a quick look at the patent, had a quick look at the code. To me it appears that 99,999% of all involved research has been taken from prior research from tons of scientists.
You might have good intentions, but in my value system if you invite others to also enjoy what you have stolen, you still are just a thief.
Polite reminder: Just because you managed to trick the US Patent Office into stamping your patent application does not mean you have invented something. It simply means you have managed to convince a bureaucrat to give you a stamp so you can claim ownership about other researchers' work.
Want to be part of the good guys? Burn the patent, and apologize to the research community you tried to steal from.
You're being entirely unfair to Supabase here. Research is important, but there is a reason why the USPTO has developed substantial case law around Reduction to Practice, everything is built on prior work, so to say there is nothing novel about actually building displayed working system from parts is factually inaccurate.
> Had a quick look at the patent, had a quick look at the code. To me it appears that 99,999% of all involved research has been taken from prior research from tons of scientists.
How'd you arrive at this conclusion? The stuff in the body of the patent can be expected to be 99.99% of widely known stuff, always.
What counts is that something new is disclosed, and that is what the claims cover.
A description of a patent must be enabling: it must tell someone ordinarily skilled in the art enough to reproduce the claimed invention. Gesticulating at "you could find a bunch of the simpler steps in earlier research papers" is not good enough.
How far attorneys go to make sure a patent description is wildly varying (I remember some of my earlier ones take some time to describe what a CPU and program are...) but it's best to error on the side of caution and describe well known techniques. Otherwise, you might spend time arguing in future litigation about whether the average software engineer in 2015 knew how to do a particular thing.
This comment makes no sense. They're actively open sourcing the patent and trying to get it upstream into Postgres. They purchased another company to get this patent, and they're spending a lot of money on lawyers to figure out how to release it to the community.
Call out shady shit when companies do shady things, but the sentiment behind this comment seems to be looking for reasons to bee outraged instead of at what's actually being done.
If companies get evicerated every time they try to engage with the community they'll stop engaging. We should be celebrating when they do something positive, even if there are a few critiques (e.g. the license change call out is a good one). Instead, half the comments seem like they're quick reactions meant to stoke outage.
Please have some perspective - this action is a win for the community.
I am "owner" of a bunch of patents, too, and some have actually been proven their test of time by after years having been re-invented (better: "parallel-invented later in time") elsewhere in the open source world.
But in my value system one does not do press releases saying "HELLO! We have decided not to do something evil!".
They could have done the very same thing done quietly to make clear there is no hidden agenda.
"Look, we hold this trivial patent on the open source ecosystem. No no no, all will be fine. No, no, we will not pick up the phone should Broadcom call us one day."
> To reinforce the IP compatibility, Supabase is making available a non-exclusive license of U.S. Patent (“Durable multiversion B+-tree”) to all OrioleDB users, including proprietary forks, in accordance with the OrioleDB license.
It seems that they have changed their mind to make it even more permissive.
They just relicensed the OrioleDB project under Apache 2.0 an hour ago [0], which contains a patent clause.
Legal shield? So once again people have to do manual legal work for something that can be taken for granted in any (L)GPL* software.
We should start counting the times a permissive-licensed software needs this kind of protection, and then wonder what is the difference between all this effort and just going GPL.
You don't need to hang onto hopes and public shaming until someone else does the hard part.
32 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 52.3 ms ] threadvs. the current license:
( https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/blob/main/LICENSE )imho: the current wording might discourage state organisations, since even a trivial lawsuit (e.g. a minor tax delay) could terminate the licence - perhaps a narrower patent-focused clause would work better (or an OSI-approved licence?).
How does it compare with Neon DB?
According to the docs, it “uses Postgres Table Access Method (TAM) to provide a pluggable storage engine for PostgreSQL. […] Pluggable Storage gives developers the ability to use different storage engines for different tables within the same database. Developers will be able to choose a storage method that is optimized for their specific needs: some tables could be configured for high transactional loads, others for analytics workloads, and still others for archiving.”
https://www.orioledb.com/docs
https://airtable.com/app7jp5t0dEHyDpa8/shr00etqywoDW2N6N
We have seen this issue with YugabyteDB, and their integration off RocksDB as the storage engine for postgresql.
RDS support when
When you're in IP, bang on IP
That's just the path for all who do this stuff. America seems culturally to like IP (everyone saying that copyright law is paramount and LLMs should be stopped, etc.) but that's just recent history.
This is an unfortunate limitation to be aware of when evaluating
https://www.orioledb.com/docs/usage/getting-started#current-...
"IF ANY LITIGATION IS INSTITUTED AGAINST SUPABASE, INC. BY A LICENSEE OF THIS SOFTWARE, THEN THE LICENSE GRANTED TO SAID LICENSEE SHALL TERMINATE AS OF THE DATE SUCH LITIGATION IS FILED."
This is a poison pill. At best the licensing is naive and blocks even customers of Supabase from using OrioleDB, at worst it's an attempt for Supabase to provide themselves unlimited indemnity through the guise of a community project. It means the moment you sue Supabase for anything. Contract dispute, IP, employment, unrelated tort you lose the license. They could lose your data and if you try do anything about it they can immediately counter sue for a license violation. Using the brand of the postgres license to slip this in is pretty wild.
OrioleDB looks like a promising project and undoubtedly an great contribution from Supabase but it's not open source or really usable by anyone with this license.
You might have good intentions, but in my value system if you invite others to also enjoy what you have stolen, you still are just a thief.
Polite reminder: Just because you managed to trick the US Patent Office into stamping your patent application does not mean you have invented something. It simply means you have managed to convince a bureaucrat to give you a stamp so you can claim ownership about other researchers' work.
Want to be part of the good guys? Burn the patent, and apologize to the research community you tried to steal from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice
How'd you arrive at this conclusion? The stuff in the body of the patent can be expected to be 99.99% of widely known stuff, always.
What counts is that something new is disclosed, and that is what the claims cover.
A description of a patent must be enabling: it must tell someone ordinarily skilled in the art enough to reproduce the claimed invention. Gesticulating at "you could find a bunch of the simpler steps in earlier research papers" is not good enough.
How far attorneys go to make sure a patent description is wildly varying (I remember some of my earlier ones take some time to describe what a CPU and program are...) but it's best to error on the side of caution and describe well known techniques. Otherwise, you might spend time arguing in future litigation about whether the average software engineer in 2015 knew how to do a particular thing.
that's ... that's what they are doing by making it freely available, no?
this helps anyone who is covered by the patent because they are (a bit better) protected from other patent trolls (and from other IP litigation)
The closest that comes to mind is "Free Nestlé bottled water".
Call out shady shit when companies do shady things, but the sentiment behind this comment seems to be looking for reasons to bee outraged instead of at what's actually being done.
If companies get evicerated every time they try to engage with the community they'll stop engaging. We should be celebrating when they do something positive, even if there are a few critiques (e.g. the license change call out is a good one). Instead, half the comments seem like they're quick reactions meant to stoke outage.
Please have some perspective - this action is a win for the community.
I am "owner" of a bunch of patents, too, and some have actually been proven their test of time by after years having been re-invented (better: "parallel-invented later in time") elsewhere in the open source world.
But in my value system one does not do press releases saying "HELLO! We have decided not to do something evil!".
They could have done the very same thing done quietly to make clear there is no hidden agenda.
"Look, we hold this trivial patent on the open source ecosystem. No no no, all will be fine. No, no, we will not pick up the phone should Broadcom call us one day."
Yay. \o/
It seems that they have changed their mind to make it even more permissive.
They just relicensed the OrioleDB project under Apache 2.0 an hour ago [0], which contains a patent clause.
[0]: https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb/commit/44bab2aa9879feb7...
We should start counting the times a permissive-licensed software needs this kind of protection, and then wonder what is the difference between all this effort and just going GPL.
You don't need to hang onto hopes and public shaming until someone else does the hard part.
Still, kudos for the grant.