Re: contrib/fuzzystrmatch/dmetaphone.c license

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Heikki Linnakangas
<hlinnakangas(at)vmware(dot)com> wrote:
> contrib/fuzzystrmatch/dmetaphone.c says this:
>
>> /***************************** COPYRIGHT NOTICES ***********************
>>
>> Most of this code is directly from the Text::DoubleMetaphone perl module
>> version 0.05 available from http://www.cpan.org.
>> It bears this copyright notice:
>>
>>
>> Copyright 2000, Maurice Aubrey <maurice(at)hevanet(dot)com>.
>> All rights reserved.
>>
>> This code is based heavily on the C++ implementation by
>> Lawrence Philips and incorporates several bug fixes courtesy
>> of Kevin Atkinson <kevina(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net>.
>>
>> This module is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
>> modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
>
>
> Is that OK? Perl is dual-licensed under the GPL and the "Artistic License",
> so the question is whether the Artistic License is compatible with the
> PostgreSQL license. IANAL, but I couldn't immediately figure out what the
> Artistic License requires, when you pick a piece of code and modify and
> embed it in another project.

My belief (as someone who is not a lawyer, but has spent a fair bit of
time working with them on such issues) is that it is not compatible.
The licence requires derivative works to retain the licence
properties, which have requirements that go well beyond those of our
licence, however, as you point out it's far from clear whether lifting
a piece of code would be subject to those restrictions, or be covered
by clause 8/9 (do we expose a direct interface to this functionality?)
which potentially allow the original licence to be dropped from
derivative works.

It's largely because of such uncertainties that I have been advised in
the past (by those with appropriate letters after their names) to stop
using the Artistic licence. This is why I spent nearly a year working
on changing pgAdmin to the PostgreSQL licence.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company