Re: contrib/fuzzystrmatch/dmetaphone.c license - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

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On 02/24/2015 04:47 AM, Dave Page wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Heikki Linnakangas 
> <hlinnakangas@vmware.com> wrote:
>> contrib/fuzzystrmatch/dmetaphone.c says this:
>> 
>>> /***************************** COPYRIGHT NOTICES
>>> ***********************
>>> 
>>> Most of this code is directly from the Text::DoubleMetaphone
>>> perl module version 0.05 available from http://www.cpan.org. It
>>> bears this copyright notice:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Copyright 2000, Maurice Aubrey <maurice@hevanet.com>. All
>>> rights reserved.
>>> 
>>> This code is based heavily on the C++ implementation by 
>>> Lawrence Philips and incorporates several bug fixes courtesy of
>>> Kevin Atkinson <kevina@users.sourceforge.net>.
>>> 
>>> This module is free software; you may redistribute it and/or 
>>> modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
>> 
>> 
>> Is that OK? Perl is dual-licensed under the GPL and the "Artistic
>> License", so the question is whether the Artistic License is
>> compatible with the PostgreSQL license. IANAL, but I couldn't
>> immediately figure out what the Artistic License requires, when
>> you pick a piece of code and modify and embed it in another
>> project.
> 
> My belief (as someone who is not a lawyer, but has spent a fair bit
> of time working with them on such issues) is that it is not
> compatible. The licence requires derivative works to retain the
> licence properties, which have requirements that go well beyond
> those of our licence, however, as you point out it's far from clear
> whether lifting a piece of code would be subject to those
> restrictions, or be covered by clause 8/9 (do we expose a direct
> interface to this functionality?) which potentially allow the
> original licence to be dropped from derivative works.
> 
> It's largely because of such uncertainties that I have been advised
> in the past (by those with appropriate letters after their names)
> to stop using the Artistic licence. This is why I spent nearly a
> year working on changing pgAdmin to the PostgreSQL licence.

I committed this (1 July 2004), but cannot remember any details about
a license discussion. And I searched the list archives and curiously
cannot find any email at all about it either. Maybe Andrew remembers
something.

I doubt we want to rip it out without some suitable replacement -- do we?

Joe

- -- 
Joe Conway
credativ LLC: http://www.credativ.us
Linux, PostgreSQL, and general Open Source
Training, Service, Consulting, & 24x7 Support
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