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 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/