Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Licence: GNU/GPL

Doug Royer wrote:

> The GNU license discourages vertical application vendors from
> contributing as they have to give away the source and expertise.

Only if they actually change the source and distribute those changes.

You can take Oracle's approach, i.e. work with the Linux kernel/library
folks in order to get features you want (raw I/O), then happily run your
application on top of it.

They could've done the work themselves, released that to the Linux world
under the GNU license, and still happily distribute Oracle and the
tools that come with Oracle (slowly being rolled into Linux space) in
closed an proprietary form.

> I have no problem with free source code. I do have a problem
> of having to implement some source code that belongs to a customer
> and they consider their database part of their competitive advantage.
> By having to give away the source, they tell their competitors
> how to export from their database. This does discourage commercial
> work where the database and how you access it is confidential.
>
> One advantage of PostgreSQL is that you can use it for your
> customers - and THEY own the paid for source code.

If your customers aren't releasing what they paid for, they don't have
to turn it back.

You only have to turn the source back if you *release* your changes.

OpenACS is GPL'd and about a half-dozen (growing towards a dozen,
actually) small companies do custom client db-backed websites using
Oracle and PG. The custom code we create for an individual customer's
site remains with that customer, if they prefer. There's no GPL problem
at all.

(We encourage release back to the community, of course, as a half-dozen
*small* consulting shops cooperating on making our toolkit robust and
featureful we benefit when we can share work our clients pay for).

The GPL protects us against a party wrapping everything up, extending
it, and offering an improved proprietary version and turning around and
trying to put our small firms out of business. OK, dot-com mania is
over and the odds of someone doing that are minimal. My point though is
that far from being "communist" the GPL gives us a bit more control over
the code, which helps satisfy our *capitalist* endeavors.

> The BSD license does not keep them from contributing, but it allows
> them not have to when they can't give it away. GPL is great for
> some things, but not for databases.

There's no reason why the client library, for instance, couldn't be
LGPL'd, removing this problem.

I'm not arguing that PG should switch - the BSD's a *fine* license. I

don't want anyone to misunderstand my feelings on this. Clearly the BSD
doesn't encumber the code and for those folks who are comfortable with
this, the more power to them.

But I keep reading interpretations of the GPL and its effects here that
are far removed from the real world.

Making a statement knocking the GPL in ways that show a misunderstanding
of how the license works in practice won't do much to keep this subject
from coming up periodically.

--
Don Baccus
Portland, OR
http://donb.photo.net, http://birdnotes.net, http://openacs.org