Re: Licensing - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Quoth LObermey@pervasive.com ("Lance Obermeyer"):
> MySQL is a commercial company that wants to sell licenses.  Their
> open source offering licensed under something called the GPL
> (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php), which is in
> some ways quite complex.  You or your client should consult an
> attorney to see whether your intended use meets its terms.  Based on
> your response from the MySQL account rep, it sounds like your app
> would not be in compliance.
>
> PostgreSQL, on the other hand, is licensed under something called
> the BSD (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php).  It is
> totally different, and is a much more business friendly license.  It
> essentially allows you to do whatever you want.  It is royalty free
> and does not have any important restrictions on redistribution.

That's an excellent commentary on the issues.

I'll poke at the "business friendly" bit a little bit because it seems
to me that things are a _little_ more complex than that.

The approach MySQL AB has taken with its "dual licensing" (I love to
call it "dueling licensing" ;-)) is, in fact, quite "business
friendly."  It's just that the only business that it happens to be
particularly friendly to is MySQL AB.  Ditto for TrollTech and Qt, and
Sun and OpenOffice.org.

The "GPL + Traditional License" approach that MySQL AB is encouraging
is compatible with the notion that the "market" will consist of a
single software producer with exclusive ownership of the code base who
then sell it into a traditional style "proprietary" community of
customers/consumers.

Unfortunately, in order to be able to operate under the dual licenses,
this presents the necessity that one party has exclusive ownership of
the application code.  That requirement of ownership prevents the kind
of "community participation" we see with PostgreSQL, where there are
numerous contributors working for numerous organizations.

People are often willing to sign over copyright to an organization
that operates in some form of "public interest," wherein you can see
MANY contributions that have gone to GPL-licensed software where
copyright is held by the non-profit "Free Software Foundation."

There has been, in contrast, a distinct paucity of willingness to
donate code to "dueling licenses" organizations.  Unlike the FSF
projects, you _don't_ see a lot of code coming in from outside.
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