Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> writes: > On 2018-07-26 09:51:54 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: >> There's been an awful lot of discussion in this thread that supposes that >> we can change the Postgres license. Let me just point out very clearly >> that no such thing is going to happen. There will be no changes, no >> additions, no alternate licenses, period. To change the license, we'd >> need the agreement of all current and past contributors, which is a >> completely impractical thing even if there were fairly wide consensus >> that a particular change is a good idea. Which there isn't.
> That's obviously not going to happen. But there is the less crazy > alternative of dual licensing new contributions going forward, with a > licence that's TPL compatible. No, we can't do that. Past contributions were made with the expectation that they'd be distributed under the existing license, full stop. Relicensing other people's work without their permission is definitely lawsuit bait. (Of course, most people might be fine with it, but it only takes one.) I think what you're suggesting is some legalese along the lines of "parts of this are under license X and other parts are under license Y", but nobody's going to want to deal with that. As David or someone mentioned upthread, not having to have a discussion with your corporate legal department is one of the big attractions of Postgres. Furthermore, there would be an awfully strong argument to be made that the net effect of such a thing would be that the whole of Postgres is effectively now under the double license --- because who could make use of only the old-license part, especially after a few years of mixing? So anyone who wasn't happy about their work being relicensed would still have solid grounds to sue. It's barely possible that we could get current and new contributors to sign some kind of CLA containing anti-patent terms, but I don't think there's any hope of amending the distribution license. regards, tom lane