Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 3:39 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> * Greg Stark (gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu) 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).
>
> This is a bit backwards, I think..  What you're suggesting is that, some
> day, we might want community/BSD-licensed PG to link against
> commercially licensed products from EDB for basic functionality (eg:
> encryption)?
>

No. Firstly we're not talking about linking -- linking is just a
technical step and the law is much fuzzier and general than that. When
you build a binary it's a "derivative work" of all the components that
went into building that binary whether they were linked in or not.
This includes the macros in the header files that were used, the
parser code from bison, etc.

Secondly I'm not talking about how what software is in the community
licensed PG. We have always said in the past that we want Postgres to
be usable by other people to embed in their commercially licensed
software and that means that the license has to allow not just
redistributing Postgres but redistributing it under more restrictive
licenses.

--
greg