On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Maciej Stachowiak<m...@apple.com> wrote: > > On Jun 26, 2009, at 3:46 PM, Nikunj R. Mehta 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. > > The issue I see with using Berkeley DB for implementation (which I think is > only a side issue to design of the spec itself) is as follows: Clause 3 of > the first license (the one with the Oracle copyright notice) appears to have > stricter source release requirements than LGPL. It's not clear to me what > exactly the scope of the requirement is, but it doesn't seem to have the > dynamic linking or relinkable object file exceptions of LGPL. That would be > a problem for projects like WebKit or Gecko that don't want to impost any > constraints that go beyond the LGPL in their license terms. >
Probably speaking out of turn, but on the larger point that there are non-BDB implementations that are well suited for the browser environment. For example, Tokyo Cabinet is a C library for B-tree databases, licensed under the LGPL. http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/spex-en.html TC is far from the only clearly licensed storage-engine with lots of users. Any of them (including BDB) would make a good foundation for implementing a CouchDB-like replication system in JavaScript. As a web-developer I would really get a lot out of serious native B-tree API. The nice thing is that a B-tree API is so simple it'd be easy for vendors to use any number of engines and still achieve the same spec. Chris > I don't want to start a huge debate over this, I just wanted to clarify the > issue I see. > > Regards, > Maciej > > > -- Chris Anderson http://jchrisa.net http://couch.io
