Re: Berkeley DB license (was Re: Points of order on this WG)

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Maciej Stachowiak<mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 26, 2009, at 3:46 PM, Nikunj R. Mehta wrote:
>
>> FWIW, I came across two pieces about Oracle's open source licensing of
>> Berkeley DB that might help clear the air around the licensing issues.
>>
>> First, Oracle's license [1] is word-for-word identical to the erstwhile
>> SleepyCat license [2]. Secondly, SleepyCat license "qualifies as a free
>> software license, and is compatible with the GNU General Public License."
>> [3]. Thirdly, the license is OSI approved [4].
>>
>> I am not sure if this resolves issues. It would help if you had comments
>> on the above so that I can keep that in my context while discussing with our
>> legal staff.
>
> The issue I see with using Berkeley DB for implementation (which I think is
> only a side issue to design of the spec itself) is as follows: Clause 3 of
> the first license (the one with the Oracle copyright notice) appears to have
> stricter source release requirements than LGPL. It's not clear to me what
> exactly the scope of the requirement is, but it doesn't seem to have the
> dynamic linking or relinkable object file exceptions of LGPL. That would be
> a problem for projects like WebKit or Gecko that don't want to impost any
> constraints that go beyond the LGPL in their license terms.
>

Probably speaking out of turn, but on the larger point that there are
non-BDB implementations that are well suited for the browser
environment. For example, Tokyo Cabinet is a C library for B-tree
databases, licensed under the LGPL.

http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/spex-en.html

TC is far from the only clearly licensed storage-engine with lots of
users. Any of them (including BDB) would make a good foundation for
implementing a CouchDB-like replication system in JavaScript. As a
web-developer I would really get a lot out of serious native B-tree
API. The nice thing is that a B-tree API is so simple it'd be easy for
vendors to use any number of engines and still achieve the same spec.

Chris

> I don't want to start a huge debate over this, I just wanted to clarify the
> issue I see.
>
> Regards,
> Maciej
>
>
>



-- 
Chris Anderson
http://jchrisa.net
http://couch.io

Received on Tuesday, 7 July 2009 21:59:44 UTC