Keith Bostic wrote:Sleepycat Software is (of course!) happy to have Mozilla use Berkeley DB in any way at all. Our only concern would be in granting blanket rights to companies developing proprietary products as part of granting rights to the Mozilla group. Wouldn't it be possible to put together a license that spelled that out?
Probably not, I'm afraid :-( Licenses used for Mozilla code have to be Free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) and open source (http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php) - although the two definitions are basically identical.
Any license which restricts commercial use, even if it's for people other than mozilla.org, doesn't meet those definitions.
Well the current Sleepycat license is OSI Certified open source.
It's restriction is that if you develop any software based on the solution, you have to distribute the source.
So the point of Sleepycat is not to require a licence incompatible with open source.
It seems to me Sleepycat could accept something like :
- if you use the API of gdb directly, you must redistribute your source.
- if you only use the API of NSS, you don't have to.
Maybe they would wish to add somthong in the line of : "If you use the NSS API to implement an application able to store and retrieve generic data, you must redistribute your source", just in case someone tries very hard to reimplement around NSS something that turns in back into a generic (key/data blob) storage application to get around the licence.
Such a licence would put a restriction based on the way you use the software, not who you are, or how you sell it, so I think it's compatible. I don't see a difference in princip of such a restriction with the kind of restriction there is in LGPL (if you include in your project, you have to be GPL/LGPL, if you only link, you don't have to).
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