Re: License question

Shachar Shemesh kirjutas N, 22.04.2004 kell 19:49:

> The BSD license, in contrast to PostgreSQL's, does NOT require me to
> copy license related texts around, only the copyrights themselves. It
> does pose certain restrictions on what I am allowed to do with the
> copyrights, but any modern free software license (GPL included)
> require that you keep the copyright notices around

* Copyrights by themselves do not give others any rights to use
copyrighted material, licenses do. Copyrights "reserve all rights" by
default.

* On can license only that for what he owns IP (copyright, patent, ...).

ergo, to allow other to use the code, there must be a license from the
copyright holder.

If you just keep the copyrights and not the license (either as full text
or reference) you either effectively deny others the right to use the
code as provided by you or claim ownership of code you do not really
own.

> Now, I'm not trying to heal the world. It's enough to me that the
> current copyright owners give me permissions to use the code under the
> LGPL license. I am saying that calling the PostgreSQL license "BSD
> license" is misleading.

IIRC BSD stands for "Berkeley Standard Distribution", and as PostgreSQL
was originally released as free software from Berkeley under this
license it would be weird indeed to call it anything else.

----------
Hannu