Re: [HACKERS] Re: Revised Copyright: is this more palatable?

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On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, John Daniels wrote:

>Several people have complained about forking from the BSD license. If the
>BSD license is so flawed, why not open the discussion to FreeBSD and other
>BSD license users. If the license truely is flawed, it can be "fixed" for
>all. Then no one can claim: 1) a PostgreSQL fork, 2) kow tow to corporate
>interests.
>
>People joining this discussion have varying levels of legal knowledge. It
>seems that some clarification by a legal expert on many of these issues is
>needed. And knowing the variability of "expertise" in the legal profession,
>and the importance of the issue, I'd recommend a second or third opinion
>(opening the discusion as above could help with this).

One question has been asked several times in this thread, and not,
AFAICT, answered:

What is wrong with the current license?

It's that simple. What's wrong with the current license?

I'd like to point out a couple things that are _not_ wrong with the
current license:

1.) With the current license, contributors to the code are not opened
to legal liability for the code they contribute. The BSD license
very clearly disclaims all warranty on the part of not only UCB but
also all contributors

2.) The current license does not interfere with commercial products
based on PostgreSQL. To pick a solid example of this, NCOS is an
almost direct port of NetBSD 1.3 to various `thin client' hardware.
Each year, IBM, Oracle, and NCI sell thousands of copies of this
software. In addition to the great ease with which NetBSD can be
customized to a specific purpose or ported to new hardware, a key
reason that NetBSD was chosen over Linux was that if they spend a
lot of money improving it, they can profit by their work if they
see fit to.

Remember, in the end that's what its all about, isn't it? We _want_
people to use PostgreSQL...

3.) The current license does not prevent these companies from
contributing back. IBM, for example, is preparing to donate back
a lot of the work they did to make NetBSD run on their (PowerPC
based) thin client systems.

4.) The current license does not interfere with PostgreSQL being used
with products under other license. Look at all the claims that KDE
is violating the GPL. Why? Because its authors put a hell of a lot
of work into releasing a huge piece of software under GPL, but God
forbid, some of the other code they used was not GPL'ed...

In short, there is only one thing that people are accusing the BSD
license of not being which it in fact is not: it is not the GPL.

It may in fact be that the goals and ideology of the PostgreSQL project
have changed so drastically that a move from a BSD license to a GPL is
in tune with the project's desires. If so, fine, but let's not claim
that this is `fixing' the license, or `furthering the purposes
originally set out by the PostgreSQL project'. This would be a change
in those goals, and not one which should take place without consensus
among those who have worked so hard on it.

That's my 2 cents. I'm a user of Postgres, not a developer, so I'll
shut up now :-)

- --
Jim Wise
jwise(at)draga(dot)com

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