Re: About psycopg2 (by its author) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 09/02/2010 23:37, Greg Smith wrote:
[snip]
>> So the logical choice is plain LGPL3. I am open to motivated
>> suggestions about other
>> licenses but I'll ignore such crap as "BSD is more open than LGPL".
>>
>
> I agree with your general logic and while I can't speak for everyone, I
> would be happy enough with a LGPL3 licensed psycopg (obviously
> addressing the usual OpenSSL mess) to pull the license issue off the top
> of the list as a major problem preventing broader deployment of
> psycopg.  The main two points of contention seemed to be your unique
> customizations to the license, which make a lot of legal people nervous,
> and even worse that they were so clearly limiting many types of
> commercial use.  I hope you'd appreciate that while you have have
> legitimate reasons for your license choices, ones in that form are
> likely to remind this community of the split open/commercial licenses as
> seen in products like MySQL, and we've watch that combination lead
> toward a less open community than this one wants to be.

As I said before I agree that a license that grow so many exceptions
during its lifetime is bad and I am ready to change it. But note that it
never intended to be a split open/commercial license: the final phrase
is just an acknowledgment that some companies will always ask for a
customized proprietary license, no matter the actual license [ok, unless
the actual license is BSD ;)]

> As for arguments against the LGPL, the main one I care about is that
> you're more likely to have businesses who hire people adopt a product if
> it's BSD or MIT licensed.  I make a decent chunk of my living doing
> support and customization work on open-source projects.  Anything that
> has a GPL license attached is something I'm less likely to incorporate
> into custom project work I do, because it decreases the number of
> businesses who are then interested in it.  This is mainly because they
> have to incorporate all that background into their "credits" list for
> aggregate works, and that concern inevitably opens up more questions
> better avoided about the implications of the software being bundled.
>
> I'm more concerned about increasing the market I can provide such
> solutions to than I am about people stealing my work, crediting me, or
> not sharing their own customizations.  So my preference for BSD-ish
> licenses is a pragmatic one rooted in business goals.  If you wanted to
> improve your odds of companies adopting psycopg for projects that might
> then lead to them hiring you for support or improvements to the
> software, I'd suggest that using the GPL or even the LGPL is actually
> doing the exact opposite of that.  If your goals are more about
> releasing proper free software in the original Stallman inspired sense
> of the word, the LGPL3 might be exactly the right license for you.

I understand this. In fact my goals are more about releasing free
software than having companies hiring us for psycopg development. And
sincerely I don't care about people "stealing my work" but I do care
about customers (even not related to me) receiving free software and be
correctly informed of their rights when the product is based on free
software.

That's why we (as a company) release all our software as GPL or LGPL.
(Note that I don't have any problems with other licenses, for example
when sending patches for products we use. It is just that I better like
copyleft licenses for software I write myself.)

So, be it. Next version of psycopg2 will be released using LGPL3 (plus
ssl exceptions) and I hope this would solve all current licensing problems.

[snip]
> If the license issues get sorted out as you plan, that part I think we
> can end up helping out with using our infrastructure.  You might note
> Marko Kreen already created http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Psycopg to
> start working on just that.  I think we'd all be fine with continuing to
> expand on that rather than worry about your revamping the initd.org site
> just to address the documentation goals we have.  And we would certainly
> want to work more closely with you and your other contributors on that,
> to make sure everything is accurate and complete.

initd.org will get a facelift first or later. But even if we could have
a psycopg web page ready tomorrow having a page dedicated to psycopg on
wiki.postgresql.org is great.

Also, piro is doing a great work on psycopg2 documentation:

http://piro.develer.com/psycopg2-doc/

make sure to check it out.

federico

--
Federico Di Gregorio                                       fog@initd.orgI porcellini di terra sono davvero Crostacei!
Nonlo sapevo! Certo che sono crostacei, hanno la crosta! Allora la pizza è un crostaceo?!               -- discorso
all'ESC2k07