Re: Official ODBC announcement

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 09:06:51PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> >Well, GPL is certainly a minus for a lot of PostgreSQL folks. The
> >current ODBC driver is LGPL and that seems OK, though not ideal. Seems
> >we will have to live with two drivers, one GPL and one LGPL.
>
> We are taking a very similar road as TrollTech with QT on this
> particular project. We want to deliver the highest quality driver
> possible which means we need to insure a revenue stream from those who
> would need to use ODBC in a closed sourced environment.
>
> The driver is still Open Source and still free to those who will be
> using or creating software that is GPL compatible.

From what I understand of how the GPL applies; closed source software
will still be able to use a GPL ODBC driver without any issues at all.
It is only if they make something that (a) is a modified ODBC
driver based on yours or (b) can ONLY work with this GPL driver
(so, if it can potentially use other drivers, which most ODBC
clients can... there is no issue).

I can definitely understand the benefit of commercial support.

Why would the ability to distribute the ODBC driver without having to
distribute source be something that a company is willing to pay money for?
What do you see as the business (or community) advantage of this?
Do you expect that the amount of commercial interest in licensing the
ODBC driver itself will compensate for the lack of contributions and
potential issues in community support that it will cause?

Lastly, why would the program support 8.x+ only? If you are using libpq
I would image that supporting 7.x+ would be trivial (and necessary).

Overall though, the idea is great and PostgreSQL really does need a
robust and well supported ODBC driver.

I look forward to your response,
Max