Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

Charles(dot)McDevitt(at)emc(dot)com wrote:
> The GNU people will never be 100% satisfied by anything you do to psql, other than making it GPL.
> Readline is specifically licensed in a way to try to force this (but many disagree with their ability to force this).
>

The "GNU people" are perfectly content with the license of PostgreSQL.
They are unhappy with the license terms of OpenSSL, which is fair
because they are ridiculous. Eric Young and the rest of the
contributors produced a useful piece of software, and made it considerly
less valuable to the world due to the ego trip terms:
http://www.openssl.org/source/license.html -- the worst specific problem
is the requirement to acknowledge OpenSSL use in advertising of projects
that use it.

The PostgreSQL community has had similar issues with popular software
commonly used on top of PostgreSQL, that happened to use a non-standard
license with unique terms. It would be both hypocritical and incorrect
to now blame the GNU projects for taking a similar stand on this one.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us
"PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books