Hi, all, First of all, sorry for the cross-posting. I know that many - if not most of you - follow more than one list, but I needed to make sure that this announcement was promulgated as widely as possible to our community. Due to issues that many of you may or may not be aware of, we are in the process of solving specific issues that have arisen with the hsqldb Project and the group. The first and most important of these is the issue of the license under which we labor in this project.
Due to a rewrite and release of a new version of the GPL last year, I formalized the license published in our source and binary distributions as the re-written and GPL (and Apache and Artistic) -compatible license to the purest form of the so-called "modified BSD" or mBSD (also known as the BSD2, post-1999 BSD or MIT X- license). Since 1999, when the Board of Regents of the University of California deleted the so-called 'advertising clause,', the license we decided to use for this project has simply used the term "the BSD License." When I decided to begin the license formalization (after the rewrite of the GPL), I took the license in as pure a form as I could, omitting more formal and specific terminology, to keep the license more understandable. I also mistakenly allowed some typographic errors committed to CVS and the binary and source packages to slip through. These issues have been resolved in the enclosed files. In the latter part of this last year, a number of commercial and open-source projects and products appeared which moved the original author of our source Project, Hypersonic SQL, Thomas Mueller, to request we also come into compliance with his previous license (http://hsql.sourceforge.net). Additionally, a group of developers have 'forked' the project code and are also not in compliance with the wishes of the original author and his license. I am enclosing two documents: hsqldb_lic.txt and hypersonic_lic.txt. On all modules that are originally part of the original work of Thomas' and the Hypersonic SQL Group (currently the majority of our classes), the hypersonic_lic.txt will apply. For modules that are exclusively ours (such as those belonging to boucherb's long-awaited .clazz package) the hsqldb_lic.txt will apply. This will go for all future releases and code, whether in the CVS tree or in our distributions and file downloads. This includes patches and bugfixes. The final judgment on what license applies will be mine alone, in consult with the hsqldb-CORE and officers of the hsqldb Development Group. The above issues will be effective immediately. Under advice of legal counsel and in careful reading of the Establishment document of this body and our stated purposes, these changes will be made and announcements will be released to that effect publicly in the coming days. No vote is necessary, and none will be solicited, for obvious reasons. These are not changes to the licenses. They are firming (under law) and affirming the Project's control on its intellectual property and compliance with the letter and spirit (and wishes) of the licenses that the original developers wished their work distributed under. To those who are, or who are in contact with, members of commercial and OSI-approved projects and products who use or develop core parts of, complete binaries, or offshoots of Hypersonic SQL, hsql and hsqldb in their products and projects, I urge you to carefully read the licenses and move as quickly as you can towards compliance. In the coming months, our project will move as quickly as possible to clarify and unify our source and binaries under the license as enclosed as 'hsqldb_lic.txt'. Until that time, I urge you to respect the wishes of the Project's original authors. As always, thank you all for your work. I urge you to become as involved as you have time for and not to hesitate to contact me if you have questions, suggestions or comments at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you again for your support of the project and our efforts. I address this document, not in any way dictatorially, but as the Admin, or Chief Operating Officer. This message has been previously sent to the CORE and blind-copied to Thomas Mueller and the Maintainer. The Project and the website will be updated by Wednesday, 06 March, 2002. CVS will be updated subsequent to the release of the v.1.7 release. Michael J. Cannon/dedmike hsqldb.org Project Manager and COO _______________________________________________ hsqldb-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hsqldb-developers
