Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

* Greg Stark (gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu) wrote:
> Well for what it's worth we want to support both. At least the project
> philosophy has been that commercial derivatives are expected and
> acceptable so things like EDB's products, or Greenplums, or for that
> matter Pokertracker's all include other proprietary source that of
> course has restrictive licenses ("OpenSSL-type-licensed" except even
> *more* restrictive).

This is a bit backwards, I think.. What you're suggesting is that, some
day, we might want community/BSD-licensed PG to link against
commercially licensed products from EDB for basic functionality (eg:
encryption)?

I agree that we want to reduce and eliminate, to the extent possible,
our dependence on GPL or OpenSSL-type-licensed libraries. It's
unfortunate that there isn't a good non-GPL option for libreadline, but
I'm not sure what EDB or anyone else would expect the PG community to
do regarding that. Should PG remove support for libreadline? Should
the PG community make libedit a good BSD-licensed alternative to
libreadline? Neither of those really make sense to me.

Thanks,

Stephen