Re: [HACKERS] Copyright

Thomas Lockhart wrote:
>
> > This depends on the definition of open source; I think Netscape is
> > OpenSource these days, but I doubt if anyone would be allowed to take the
> > sources and create "Petscape: The Dog's Browser". But, as far as I know, I
> > could go away tomorrow with the PostgreSQL sources and create "Mostgress",
> > so long as I did not try to sell it. AFAIK, I might even get away with
> > selling it, but it's not really the point.
>
> Yes you could. The original Postgres developers (or at least some of
> them) did just that in founding Illustra. They sold the company a
> couple of years later for $50M US to Informix.

Actually Postgres was _not_ distributed under the BSD (do-whatever-you-want
but
give credit) license but a much more restrictive license that required a
special
permission from UBC to to anything non-educational.

IIRC Stonebraker et al founded Illustra after getting special permissions from
UCB

The shift to BSD license (that enabled the current blooming of PostgreSQL ;)
was oftained sometime during the development of postgres 95, with some
considerable backing from Stonebraker.

>
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Hannu