Re: Proposal: replace no-overwrite with Berkeley DB

on 5/15/00 2:15 AM, Michael A. Olson at mao(at)sleepycat(dot)com wrote:

> Berkeley DB is Open Source. It's free for use in other Open Source
> projects, like PostgreSQL. If a developer wants to use it in a
> proprietary application, then the developer needs to pay Sleepycat
> a licensing fee -- that's how we make our living. But Open Source
> projects don't have to pay us anything. You can download the full
> package from our Web site at www.sleepycat.com.

I have to add my 0.02 to this issue. I read the informal description of the
Sleepycat license (http://www.sleepycat.com/licensing.html). It looks like a
commercial twist on BSD with a GPL sense to it.

If this were a totally new product, I think it might be an acceptable
license, a compromise between BSD's total freedom and the GPL's push to keep
things open-source. However, given that there are existing users of Postgres
who probably use the binary without distributing source, this license is
significantly more restrictive than the previous one, and would force
current users to review their practices.

It seems that forcing this new license on Postgres would be
counter-productive at a time when the user base seems to be on the rise and
PostgreSQL is starting to make a new, quality name for itself in the
Open-Source community.

This is by no means a judgement of Berkeley DB Data Store as a product, just
a point about current users of PostgreSQL and their expectations.

-Ben