Re: [HACKERS] Re: Revised Copyright: is this more palatable? - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Richard Poole wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 05, 2000 at 11:13:45PM -0300, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> > On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Jim Wise wrote:
> >
> > > I'd like to point out a couple things that are _not_ wrong with the
> > > current license:
> > >
> > > 1.) With the current license, contributors to the code are not opened
> > >     to legal liability for the code they contribute.  The BSD license
> > >     very clearly disclaims all warranty on the part of not only UCB but
> > >     also all contributors
> >
> > Actually, this is the only thing that I do feel the current license is
> > missing ... unless I'm reading something wrong, it all focuses on
> > disclaming "UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA"s liability ... that one is very
> > specific ...
>
> Since no-one else has mentioned this yet, I will: the Postgres license,
> i.e., the file COPYRIGHT at the top level of the distribution, isn't
> exactly identical to what's commonly known as "the BSD license".

    Ya, I just clued into that ... throughout all the discussions, I
never once thought to do a 'cat /usr/src/COPYRIGHT' on my machine :(

> The
> Postgres copyright, the BSD 4.4 copyright
> (http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html), and the FreeBSD copyright
> (http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html), are all
> differently worded in parts, although clearly the same in intent. The
> latter is almost identical to the BSD license template at
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html . All of them

Damn, why didn't anyone ever actually look at this stuff before?  And ya,
I'm just as guilty as the rest ...

> The simplest way to change our license if we want to make sure that it
> explicitly disclaims warranties on behalf of all contributors seems to
> be to add to the existing California paragraphs a dead standard BSD
> license with our contributors referred to collectively, which is what
> Marc has proposed.

Quite frankly, I like the one that OpenSource.Org provides as standard for
BSD License ... it encompasses everything as one Para instead of repeating
things ...

With wu-ftpd, each source file has this included, as well as a line
consisting of "Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>" for each developer that did
work in that file ...

My personal opinion is to replace the BSD License of 1996 with the BSD
License of today (and keep up with changes to it), as it has been adopt'd
by other Open Source Projects ... as is provided on

      http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html

Something nice, simple and industry standard:

======================[ README file ]===============================

PostgreSQL Data Base Management System (formerly known as Postgres95)

This directory contains the _______ release of PostgreSQL, as well as
various post-release patches in the patches directory.  See INSTALL for
the installation notes and HISTORY for the changes.

We also have a WWW home page located at: http://www.postgreSQL.org


=====================[ COPYRIGHT file ]===============================

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