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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 ton

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.

dkhenry 1y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice
- kiwicopple 1y ago
  To add to your point: we didn’t file the patent. we acquired it (at a considerable cost) and we are working to make it freely available https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196771
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Mad respects. People might say that the company is doing it for good will, but that is the point, it is better to get the good will of the users by actually helping them instead of being like thousands of other companies which don't even do that. It is a nuanced topic but I feel like we should encourage companies which do good period. (like silksong / team cherry in gaming) etc. I will look further into this now :p thanks!
  - mind-blight 1y ago
    Yeah, huge props here. There's a contingent on HN that seems to assume that almost any action by a company is done in bad faith. I dislike all of the shady stuff that happens, but that's why we should celebrate when companies are doing awesome things. This is all positive. Super appreciate what you folks have done. It's clearly hard, well intentioned, and thoughtfully executed.
mlyle 1y ago
> 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.
- drob518 1y ago
  True. For some of my patents, the write ups make clear that the attorneys didn’t really understand how things worked. At some point, reviewing these things, you have to say, “Yea, okay, close enough,” and sign off on it.
  - crubier 1y ago
    100% truth. People complain of AI Slop, but patent legalese Slop is 100x worse and has been going on for 100years. Absolute garbage
pas 1y ago
> Burn the patent 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)
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  Not really? You can build on top of their code, but as far as I can tell, you can’t build your own thing separately.
  - dantiberian 1y ago
    From the article: The intention of OrioleDB is not to compete with Postgres, but to make Postgres better. We believe the right long-term home for OrioleDB is inside Postgres itself. Our north star is to upstream what’s necessary so that OrioleDB can eventually be part of the Postgres source tree, developed and maintained in the open alongside the rest of Postgres.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Fischgericht 1y ago
      OK, just saved to the file cringespeak.txt: "Our north star is to..." :)
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  A US Patent can not be ever open-sourced. In legal and logical terms, those are on the pretty much opposite sides of the spectrum. The closest that comes to mind is "Free Nestlé bottled water".
  - pas 1y ago
    why? the usual OSI licenses all work through copyright, and through conditional granting of rights (hence the name license) for a parent granting irrevocable royalty-free usage rights to anyone is equivalent to putting it into the public domain, no? both copyright and a patent grants exclusive rights to the rightsholder (right to perform, modify, or in case of patents to use the invention in the way covered by one of the claims), and the rightsholder is free to include more persons in the group of authorized users (ie. extend the rights to others, and can do so conditionally - hence the Apache2 patent grant) can you please explain where my understanding is incorrect or missing something? thanks!
mind-blight 1y ago
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.
- Fischgericht 1y ago
  I stated I see the good intentions. 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/

dkhenry 1y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice

kiwicopple 1y ago
To add to your point: we didn’t file the patent. we acquired it (at a considerable cost) and we are working to make it freely available https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196771
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Mad respects. People might say that the company is doing it for good will, but that is the point, it is better to get the good will of the users by actually helping them instead of being like thousands of other companies which don't even do that. It is a nuanced topic but I feel like we should encourage companies which do good period. (like silksong / team cherry in gaming) etc. I will look further into this now :p thanks!
- mind-blight 1y ago
  Yeah, huge props here. There's a contingent on HN that seems to assume that almost any action by a company is done in bad faith. I dislike all of the shady stuff that happens, but that's why we should celebrate when companies are doing awesome things. This is all positive. Super appreciate what you folks have done. It's clearly hard, well intentioned, and thoughtfully executed.

mlyle 1y ago

> 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.

drob518 1y ago
True. For some of my patents, the write ups make clear that the attorneys didn’t really understand how things worked. At some point, reviewing these things, you have to say, “Yea, okay, close enough,” and sign off on it.
- crubier 1y ago
  100% truth. People complain of AI Slop, but patent legalese Slop is 100x worse and has been going on for 100years. Absolute garbage

pas 1y ago

> Burn the patent 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)

mananaysiempre 1y ago
Not really? You can build on top of their code, but as far as I can tell, you can’t build your own thing separately.
- dantiberian 1y ago
  From the article: The intention of OrioleDB is not to compete with Postgres, but to make Postgres better. We believe the right long-term home for OrioleDB is inside Postgres itself. Our north star is to upstream what’s necessary so that OrioleDB can eventually be part of the Postgres source tree, developed and maintained in the open alongside the rest of Postgres.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Fischgericht 1y ago
    OK, just saved to the file cringespeak.txt: "Our north star is to..." :)
Fischgericht 1y ago
A US Patent can not be ever open-sourced. In legal and logical terms, those are on the pretty much opposite sides of the spectrum. The closest that comes to mind is "Free Nestlé bottled water".
- pas 1y ago
  why? the usual OSI licenses all work through copyright, and through conditional granting of rights (hence the name license) for a parent granting irrevocable royalty-free usage rights to anyone is equivalent to putting it into the public domain, no? both copyright and a patent grants exclusive rights to the rightsholder (right to perform, modify, or in case of patents to use the invention in the way covered by one of the claims), and the rightsholder is free to include more persons in the group of authorized users (ie. extend the rights to others, and can do so conditionally - hence the Apache2 patent grant) can you please explain where my understanding is incorrect or missing something? thanks!

mind-blight 1y ago

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.

Fischgericht 1y ago
I stated I see the good intentions. 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/