Re: Path to PostgreSQL portabiliy

On Wednesday 08 May 2002 11:37 am, Thomas Lockhart wrote:
> 1) cygwin is licensed under GPL. So is GNU/Linux, which provides the
> same APIs as cygwin does. Linux does not pollute application licenses,
> presumably because Linux itself is not *required* to run the

The Linux kernel is not under a pure GPL.

COPYING in the kernel source says this, prepended to the GPL:
NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel
is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

Linus Torvalds

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Does cygwin make the same statement?

> 2) If (1) does not exempt the PostgreSQL app from GPL polution, then why
> not distribute PostgreSQL on Windows using a GPL license?

[snip]

> 3) If (2) is the case, then development could continue under the BSD
> license, since developers could use the BSD-original code for their
> development work. So there is no risk of "backflow polution".

Can PostgreSQL, Inc be the GPL distributor for these purposes, being a
separate entity from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group?
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11