Re: Berkeley DB license

Tom Lane wrote:
>
>
> 3. Additional access methods. Mike thinks we could live with using
> BDB's Recno access method for primary heap storage. I'm dubious
> (OK, call me stubborn...). We also have index methods that BDB hasn't
> got. I'm not sure that our GIST code is being used or is even
> functional,

There was some discussion about GIST in 6.x and at least some people
seemed to use it for their specific needs.

> but the rtree code has certainly got users. So, how hard
> might it be to add raw-heap and rtree access methods to BDB?
>

What if we go ahead an add R-tree and Gist and whatnot to DBD,
won't they become property of Sleepycat licensable for business
use by them only ?

Ditto for other things we may need to push inside BDB to keep good
structure.

>
> Anyone see any major points that I've missed here?
>

I still feel kind of eery about making some parts of code
proprietary/GPL/BDB-PL and using PostgreSQL only for SQL layer
and not storage.

We should probably also look at the pre-Sleepycat (v 1.x.x)
BDB code that had the original Berkeley license and see what we
could make of that.

It does not have transaction support, but we already have MVCC.

It does not have page size restrictions either ;)

And using even it still gives some bragging rights to Sleepycat ;)

---------
Hannu