Niclas Hedhman wrote:
On Tuesday 26 July 2005 07:56, Michael A. Olson wrote:
Let me begin by pointing out what may be obvious -- there's no issue
of compatibility between the Apache License 2.0 and the Sleepycat
Public License. The Sleepycat license was designed to be identical in
effect with the GPL.
Ok. And Apache projects can not use GPLed products for the same reasons. (And
according to FSF GPLed projects can't use Apache licensed products, due to
some patent grant issues...)
This is unfortunately true. However GPLed code can use Apache licenced
products I thought. INAL so I would not know. Is it actually the case?
To be clear, Sleepycat believes in open source software. We support
it with real cash, for developer salaries, and with our time and
effort, in supporting open source projects that use Berkeley DB. We
don't, however, write software for free, for other people to sell.
Great. I don't think anyone here is questioning the honorable intents of
Sleepycat. This is purely a principle of Open/Free idealogies, of which one
or the other is not "more right", just different and not legally compatible.
Indeed! I personally have a profound respect for the folks at
SleepyCat. They helped us considerably while ApacheDS was known as the
LDAPd server at sourceforge.net. We at that time used the JNI
interfaces to Berkeley DB the C edition. They were very cooperative
with us in giving us the support they would give to paying clients. I
would imagine the people at SleepyCat need to eat, pay their mortgage ..
and so on.
Our experience in the open source DS world has been that people really
don't make proprietary mods to the open source products.
That may be true for the majority of users, up until the point where the
project is no longer maintained. However, ASF believes it is not up to us to
decide what the downstream users want to do with the software.
Also true. The ASF tries to maintain as much liberty as possible for
our users whether they be commercial companies with closed sources or
open source developers.
P.S. Mental Note to Incubation members; This slipped through Incubation, so I
think we need to tighten the checks over there. Each project listing all
external dependencies and which license they are all in, in a table, perhaps.
Nothing slipped through incubation Niclas. We switched from using
Berkeley DB C edition to JDBM and have no dependencies what so ever on
external software with conflicting licenses.
Alex
