On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Nikunj R. Mehta<nikunj.me...@oracle.com> wrote: > 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.
Unfortunately this does not resolve the issue. "OSI approved" is entirely different from compatible with any specific license (GPL, LGPL, MPL or anything else). Also, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to simply exclude non open-source browsers. We want the browser space to be competative, both for open source browsers and for proprietary browsers. If the API we come up with is prohibitively complex to implement without either releasing the browser as open source, or by licensing software from Oracle or any other party, then I think we haven't designed a good API. / Jonas
