Re: Points of order on this WG

On Friday 2009-06-26 11:27 -0700, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> Note that mozilla has since long made a commitment not to ship code
> that is not compatible with all of GPL, LGPL *and* MPL. So unless the
> BDB license is compatible with all those three we couldn't use BDB.

I think our (Mozilla's) requirement is actually slightly stronger
than license compatibility, at least as defined by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility .  Rather, I
think we require that the licenses don't impose any restrictions in
addition to those imposed by the MPL, the LGPL, or the GPL.  (In
other words, that the license is less restrictive than *each* of
those licenses.)

For what it's worth, the license document in question, located at
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/htdocs/oslicense.html
appears to suggest that the files in the source code are covered
under three different licenses (although it's not entirely clear to
me what is meant by the concatenation of three licenses, my initial
guess is that it means different parts are covered under different
licenses).  The second and third given appear to me to be the
three-part BSD license (varying by whether the copyright holder is
the UC Regents or Harvard University).  If my quick glance is
correct and this is identical to the three-part BSD license, then I
suspect the second and third licenses are unlikely to be a problem
for Mozilla; we already include code licensed under the three-part
BSD license (see http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php ).

The first license, on the other hand, appears to be a modified
version of the BSD license, with the third claused replaced by an
entirely different one.  I don't recognize this clause, and I
suspect it would require legal analysis to determine whether it's
less restrictive than the MPL, LGPL, and GPL.  (Though the part that
says "For an executable file, complete source code means the source
code for all modules it contains." seems pretty restrictive to my
untrained eyes.)

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 19:43:10 UTC