Notice in all three cases the guys on the receiving end of the patent suit were big companies. Big companies have lots of money, so they get sued over patents, and when people slip and fall in the parking lots, and when they fire people. Big companies getting sued over something doesn't mean it's an actual problem.

If you don't mind my asking, where were you working when you had to replace this software?

I see. It's ok as long as it's someone else getting screwed.

As far as my own situation, the details are here: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39194883,00.ht...

Ironically it was another "ARC" patent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Replacement_Cache

I didn't say it was ok. More like inevitable. Big cos get sued. It doesn't mean much.

From the article, it doesn't sound like you were required by an injunction to remove any code. Someone just read in the news about some newly issued patent and panicked. What's the plan for dealing with the 1000 other patents PostgreSQL is violating?

No, thankfully the issue was delt with quickly. There were also other good reasons to upgrade.

The PostgreSQL project tries to stick with things for which there is plenty of prior art and thankfully most of the best stuff in databases is old enough so that patents aren't a big issue.

Unfortunately some of the things people do with PostgreSQL's extensibility aren't as old. I'm sure there are some people out there using custom UDF/UDA functions that may infringe on patents.