Re: beta testing version - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Horst Herb wrote:

> > > Branding. Phone support lines. Legal departments/Lawsuit prevention.
> Figuring
> > > out how to prevent open source from stealing the thunder by duplicating
>              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > features. And building a _product_.
> 
> Oops. You didn't really mean that, did you? Could it be that there are some
> people out there thinking "let them free software fools do the hard initial
> work, once things are working nicely, we take over, add a few "secret"
> ingredients, and voila - the commercial product has been created?
> 
> After reading the statement above I believe that surely most of the
> honest developers involved in postgres would wish they had chosen GPL
> as licensing scheme.
> 
> I agree that most of the work is always done by a few. I also agree
> that it would be nice if they could get some financial reward for it.
> But no dirty tricks please. Do not betray the base. Otherwise, the
> broad developer base will be gone before you even can say
> "freesoftware".
> 
> I, for my part, have learned another lesson today. I was just about to
> give in with the licensing scheme in our project to allow the GPL
> incompatible OpenSSL to be used. After reading the above now I know it
> is worth the extra effort to "roll our own" or wait for another GPL'd
> solution rather than sacrificing the unique protection the GPL gives
> us.

to this day, this still cracks me up ... if a BSD licensed OSS project
somehow gets its code base "closed", that closing can only affect the code
base from its closing on forward ... on that day, there is *nothing*
stopping from the OSS community from taking the code base from teh second
before it was closed and running with it ...

you get no more, and no less, protection under either license.  

the "protection" that GPL provides is that it prevents someone from taking
the code, making proprietary modications to it and branding it as their
own for release ... cause under GPL, they would have to release the source
code for the modifications ...

PgSQL, Inc hasn't done anything so far but develop third party
*applications* over top of PgSQL, with plans to release them at various
stages as the clients we are developing them for permit ... as well as
provided consulting to clients looking at moving towards PgSQL and
requiring help with migrations ...

We aren't going to release something that is half-assed and buggy ... the
whole erServer stuff right now is *totally* external to the PgSQL server,
and, as such, is a third-party application, not a proprietary extension
like Don wants to make it out to be ...