Re: [ANNOUNCE] pgAdmin Licencing Changes

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On Thu, 22 May 2003, Ed Carp wrote:

>On Wed, 21 May 2003, Dave Page wrote:
>
>> - Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
>> the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.
>
>If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
>distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
>Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
>distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
>or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.

Yes and no. The copyright holder cannot withdraw from you the license
under which he offered you the code (unless the license includes a
provision allowing him to do so), but he can certainly retroactively
make the code available under a different license _as well_.

If you _wish_ to redistribute a copy of pgAdmin which you downloaded
before the license change under the old license, you are quite correct
that you may still do so.

You may now, however, redistribute it under the Artistic license
instead, if you prefer, which is wonderful.

This is the same step which the University of California took last year
in retroactively removing the advertising clause from the license under
which the CSRG BSD releases may be redistributed.

- --
Jim Wise
jwise(at)draga(dot)com
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