Creator here. I would absolutely agree with this, but let me shed a bit more light to clarify: the underlying idea of B+ trees with inline caches is not patented (or maybe it was, but a long time ago?). Tokutek's patents are all focused on the methods they use to achieve concurrent operations on a single tree--they have a very interesting & novel locking protocol.
The Hitchhiker tree completely avoids their patents, since it makes very different decisions in order to become purely functional.
The Hitchhiker tree completely avoids their patents, since it makes very different decisions in order to become purely functional.