Technicalities aside, isn't the spirit of that license essentially:
"if you make money off BDB, we should too". So SVN is a product that
is free, BDB is too. I also thought that commercial web sites using
BDB as a store were intended to be covered too - that seems to be the
community concensus.
It's the definition of linking that is usually troublesome with Lisp
and licensing. If we look at it like Python as you intend below, then
only the Lisp image itself need be open source (i.e. SBCL). However
Lisp is also compiled and dynamically linked with the image, which
tends to make us look a little bit more like a dynamically linked
program that GNU, in general, considers part of the application (i.e.
contaminated)
Has anyone ever really ruled on this point in the Lisp community?
This is in large part the reason for the LLGPL approach that Franz
takes. The GPL technically says that a GPL library contaminates the
whole lisp image, including application code. This is why I advocated
the switch of the Elephant code license from GPL to LLPGL.
Actually, Franz might have some light to shed on this (they clearly
had to pay for AllegroStore, but they might understand the licensing
issues better).
Ian
On Feb 13, 2008, at 3:41 AM, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:
I recently purchased LispWorks for Windows. Downloaded Elephant and
was able to make it
work with BDB. Thanks (and congrats!) for such a nice package. I
have heard that QDBM is
much better than BDB in terms of performance and does not have the
same licensing issues
(there are royalty payments for embeding BDB in an application).
IANAL, but the licensing FAQ has a case that can be made be
analogous to Elephant:
“Do I have to pay for a Berkeley DB license to use it in my Perl or
Python scripts?
No, you may use the Berkeley DB open source license at no cost. The
Berkeley DB open
source license requires that software that uses Berkeley DB be
freely redistributable.
In the case of Perl or Python, that software is Perl or Python, and
not your scripts.
Any scripts you write are your property, including scripts that make
use of Berkeley DB.
None of the Perl, Python or Berkeley DB licenses place any
restrictions on what you may
do with them.”[1]
Also, when we talk about QDBM, I must ask: do you know of its
successor, Tokyo Cabinet[2]?
Leslie
[1]
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/htdocs/licensing.html
[2] http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/
--
My personal blog: http://blog.viridian-project.de/
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