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

At 17:51 4/07/00 +0200, Jan Wieck wrote:
>The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>>
> The new license should clearly make it impossible to later
> pull out things again.

My legal advice is that, assuming they knew it was a BSD project, they
can't take it out of PostgreSQL. But you could, for example, stop Microsoft
using your compression code in one of their products. The new license
removes this right from you.

> I still hold the
> copyright on 'em - don't I.

You will have the copyright, even under the new license. All you are doing
is waiving your rights to restrict it's use in any way whatsoever for any
purpose.

> Can a new license change the
> legal state of previous contributions?

No.

> I don't think so. What
> do we have to do to reversely apply this "irrevocable" term
> to all so far done contributions?

Yes. Sticking with BSD looks good to me.

> And some words to all the people who think GPL is better.
> IMHO it is a kind of Open Source Fashism. Forcing everything
> that uses a little snippet of open code to be open too
> doesn't have anything to do with free software. There are a
> couple of things Open Source can never offer. For example a
> native DB-link interface between a Postgres DB and a
> commercial one might require NDA to get internals. Surely a
> useful thing that must be a closed source product, so what
> would it be good for to make it's development impossible?

I agree this is a problem with GPL; perhaps not with LGPL if the new code
could be written to require minimum changes to existing PG code, and if the
PG changes were not related to the NDA. I don't really want to start a GPL
vs. BSD argument here, I'm just asking if you had thought of that possibility.

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