On Sat, Jul 7, 2018 at 9:01 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
Hi,
On 2018-07-07 20:51:56 +0200, David Fetter wrote: > As to "dual license," that's another legal thicket in which we've been > wise not to involve ourselves. "Dual licensing" is generally used to > assert proprietary rights followed immediately by a demand for > payment. This is a thing we don't want to do, and it's not a thing we > should be enabling others to do as part of our project. If they wish > to do that, they're welcome to do it without our imprimatur.
This is pure FUD. Obviously potential results of dual licensing depends on the license chosen. None of what you describe has anything to do with potential pieces of dual PG License / Apache 2.0 licensed code in PG, or anything similar. You could at any time choose to only use / redistribute postgres, including derivatives, under the rights either license permits.
I think there's fair arguments to be made that we do not want to go fo for dual licensing with apache 2.0. Biggest among them that the current situation is the established practice. But let's have the arguments be real, not FUD.
First, generally, dual licensing is used to assert proprietary rights and that's actually the issue here (the scope of the patent-holder's rights) and the fact that it would change the future code use in some not very nice ways. The major exception I know of is the Perl situation where you have this GPL v2/Artistic License release but I am not entirely sure the historical reasons for this.
The problem here is the scope of a patent right is different here and this would effectively mean the Apache License is the real license of the product.
I assume we agree that the PostgreSQL license plus a patent encumbrance would be the same as the scope of the patent license, not the scope of the copyright license.