Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 3:16 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
>> Well for what it's worth we want to support both. At least the project
>> philosophy has been that commercial derivatives are expected and
>> acceptable so things like EDB's products, or Greenplums, or for that
>> matter Pokertracker's all include other proprietary source that of
>> course has restrictive licenses ("OpenSSL-type-licensed" except even
>> *more* restrictive).
>
> That might not be possible of libreadline makes psql require a GPL
> license.
>

There's a lot of confusion in this thread between the license terms
that Postgres source is distributed under and the license terms that
apply to distributing the resulting binary build. It shouldn't be
surprising that if you build Postgres to use other software that the
resulting binaries are covered by the union of all the licenses of
that code including both Postgres and any libraries you build with.

readline is an optional configure option. If we didn't have readline
support today and someone suggested adding a configure option to
support it wouldn't follow that having that option makes it any harder
to support non-GPL'd binary packages than if the configure option
wasn't there. Either way you can't distribute a binary with readline
in it unless you can follow the readline license.

Perhaps we should make configure print a warning for each
non-Postgres-license software it's being configured to use with a
pointer to the license for the configured. That might make it more
obvious to people that while Postges is licensed under a given
license, they might be configuring their build to depend on other code
under other licenses.

--
greg