On Jun 26, 2009, at 3:46 PM, Nikunj R. Mehta wrote:
FWIW, I came across two pieces about Oracle's open source licensing
of Berkeley DB that might help clear the air around the licensing
issues.
First, Oracle's license [1] is word-for-word identical to the
erstwhile SleepyCat license [2]. Secondly, SleepyCat license
"qualifies as a free software license, and is compatible with the
GNU General Public License." [3]. Thirdly, the license is OSI
approved [4].
I am not sure if this resolves issues. It would help if you had
comments on the above so that I can keep that in my context while
discussing with our legal staff.
The issue I see with using Berkeley DB for implementation (which I
think is only a side issue to design of the spec itself) is as
follows: Clause 3 of the first license (the one with the Oracle
copyright notice) appears to have stricter source release requirements
than LGPL. It's not clear to me what exactly the scope of the
requirement is, but it doesn't seem to have the dynamic linking or
relinkable object file exceptions of LGPL. That would be a problem for
projects like WebKit or Gecko that don't want to impost any
constraints that go beyond the LGPL in their license terms.
I don't want to start a huge debate over this, I just wanted to
clarify the issue I see.
Regards,
Maciej
