Thread: pgAdmin Licencing Changes

Following discussions within the pgAdmin development team, I'm pleased
to announce the following changes to pgAdmin's licence. These changes
are being implemented due to concerns raised by some parties about the
wording used in the pgAdmin Public Licence.

- All future versions of pgAdmin will be released under the Artistic
Licence.

- Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.

Note that pgAdmin I and the pgAdmin II Migration Wizard are released
under the GNU General Public Licence and are not affected by these
changes.

For future versions of pgAdmin, these changes mean that end users and
developers are guaranteed greater freedom to use and work with the
pgAdmin code than under the old licence.

For previous versions of pgAdmin II, any user or developer may consider
the code to be under either the pgAdmin Public Licence under which they
downloaded it, or the Artistic licence if they prefer.

The Artistic licence is an OSI approved Open Source licence and can be
found here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php

Regards, Dave.

--
Dave Page
pgAdmin Project Lead

On Wed, 21 May 2003, Dave Page wrote:

> - Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
> the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.

If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.

Ed Carp <erc@pobox.com> writes:
> On Wed, 21 May 2003, Dave Page wrote:
>> - Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
>> the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.

> If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
> distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.

Sure it is, since the pgAdmin Public Licence is what was there before.
He is granting existing users the option to choose to follow the
Artistic Licence terms instead; he is not taking away any rights.

            regards, tom lane

> If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
> distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
> Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already

Actually as long as all authors of the code agree it should not be a
problem at all.

Sincerely,

Joshua Drake



> distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
> or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.
>
>
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--
Co-Founder
Command Prompt, Inc.
The wheel's spinning but the hamster's dead

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On Thu, 22 May 2003, Ed Carp wrote:

>On Wed, 21 May 2003, Dave Page wrote:
>
>> - Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
>> the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.
>
>If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
>distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
>Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
>distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
>or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.

Yes and no.  The copyright holder cannot withdraw from you the license
under which he offered you the code (unless the license includes a
provision allowing him to do so), but he can certainly retroactively
make the code available under a different license _as well_.

If you _wish_ to redistribute a copy of pgAdmin which you downloaded
before the license change under the old license, you are quite correct
that you may still do so.

You may now, however, redistribute it under the Artistic license
instead, if you prefer, which is wonderful.

This is the same step which the University of California took last year
in retroactively removing the advertising clause from the license under
which the CSRG BSD releases may be redistributed.

- --
                Jim Wise
                jwise@draga.com
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> Yes and no.  The copyright holder cannot withdraw from you the license
> under which he offered you the code (unless the license includes a
> provision allowing him to do so), but he can certainly retroactively
> make the code available under a different license _as well_.

Ah, OK.  That was the part that I missed, that *both* licenses cover the
product.  Thanks for the clarification!

> If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
> distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
> Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
> distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
> or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.

Not true, according to the lecture on Australian copyright law that we had
at linux.conf.au 2003.  There is NOTHING in copyright law preventing someone
from changing the license on already distributed copies of software.  That
is something that most open souce license users fail to realise...

Chris

On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 03:45, Ed Carp wrote:
> On Wed, 21 May 2003, Dave Page wrote:
>
> > - Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
> > the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.
>
> If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
> distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.

It's lawful --- the copyright holder(s) are just granting an additional
license to use it under.

> Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
> distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
> or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.

The copyright holder can always grant you additional permissions (unless
there is an exclusive license somewhere, etc.)

Ed Carp wrote:
> If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
> distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
> Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
> distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is
> more or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or
> court cases.

From the experience of the OpenSSH project, and the ability to utilise an
old 'BSD' licensed version of ssh, this appears to be the case.

I do not see any problem with the copyright owner re-issuing older versions
with a new license, but you *CANNOT* change the license on copies already
distributed.

Peter

On Wed, 21 May 2003, Dave Page wrote:

> - Previous versions of pgAdmin II will be retroactively relicenced under
> the Artistic Licence AND the pgAdmin Public Licence.

If by this you mean that existing versions of pgAdmin II already
distributed will be relicensed, I'm not sure that action is lawful.
Generally speaking, unilaterally attempting to change an already
distributed product to another license, regardless if that license is more
or less restrictive, has little if any basis in either law or court cases.


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