FWIW, I came across two pieces about Oracle's open source licensing of
Berkeley DB that might help clear the air around the licensing issues.
First, Oracle's license [1] is word-for-word identical to the
erstwhile SleepyCat license [2]. Secondly, SleepyCat license
"qualifies as a free software license, and is compatible with the GNU
General Public License." [3]. Thirdly, the license is OSI approved [4].
I am not sure if this resolves issues. It would help if you had
comments on the above so that I can keep that in my context while
discussing with our legal staff.
Nikunj
http://o-micron.blogspot.com
[1]
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/htdocs/oslicense.html
[2] http://opensource.org/licenses/sleepycat.php
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_License
[4] http://opensource.org/trademark
On Jun 26, 2009, at 3:27 PM, Nikunj R. Mehta wrote:
Maciej, David, Jeremy, Doug, others,
I understand the interest in using Berkeley DB in browsers provided
appropriate licensing freedom were available. I am beginning to
understand your concerns vis-à-vis Berkeley DB's license.
I have asked our legal team to clarify what they mean by the last
para of the 3rd clause of the first license. As I understand it, it
is the following text that appears problematic:
For an executable file, complete source code means the source code
for all modules it contains.
Although it might be ideal, at this time, I cannot commit to having
Berkeley DB be offered under a third (besides commercial and its
current "open source") license. I can only suggest that we move
forward one step at a time. I will try my best to get this issue
clarified in the quickest possible time. I also reaffirm the
approach that it should not be necessary to use Berkeley DB to
implement the structured storage API Oracle is proposing.
I hope this helps. Feel free to suggest other licensing terms that
appear problematic.
Nikunj
http://o-micron.blogspot.com
On Jun 26, 2009, at 12:42 PM, L. David Baron wrote:
On Friday 2009-06-26 11:27 -0700, Jonas Sicking wrote:
Note that mozilla has since long made a commitment not to ship code
that is not compatible with all of GPL, LGPL *and* MPL. So unless
the
BDB license is compatible with all those three we couldn't use BDB.
I think our (Mozilla's) requirement is actually slightly stronger
than license compatibility, at least as defined by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility . Rather, I
think we require that the licenses don't impose any restrictions in
addition to those imposed by the MPL, the LGPL, or the GPL. (In
other words, that the license is less restrictive than *each* of
those licenses.)
For what it's worth, the license document in question, located at
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/htdocs/oslicense.html
appears to suggest that the files in the source code are covered
under three different licenses (although it's not entirely clear to
me what is meant by the concatenation of three licenses, my initial
guess is that it means different parts are covered under different
licenses). The second and third given appear to me to be the
three-part BSD license (varying by whether the copyright holder is
the UC Regents or Harvard University). If my quick glance is
correct and this is identical to the three-part BSD license, then I
suspect the second and third licenses are unlikely to be a problem
for Mozilla; we already include code licensed under the three-part
BSD license (see http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php ).
The first license, on the other hand, appears to be a modified
version of the BSD license, with the third claused replaced by an
entirely different one. I don't recognize this clause, and I
suspect it would require legal analysis to determine whether it's
less restrictive than the MPL, LGPL, and GPL. (Though the part that
says "For an executable file, complete source code means the source
code for all modules it contains." seems pretty restrictive to my
untrained eyes.)
-David
--
L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/
