Re: Official ODBC announcement

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Stephen Frost
> Sent: 28 April 2005 16:26
> To: Joshua D. Drake
> Cc: pgsql-odbc(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [ODBC] Official ODBC announcement
>
> I'm still curious about how this may play out in Debian, I'm
> asking some
> folks about it. My expectation is that they're going to feel that as
> long as an application is written against ODBC that it
> doesn't directly
> depend and isn't a derived work of the GPL ODBC driver, though that
> doesn't sound like your intent here (which may concern various folks
> enough to not be willing to include it in Debian)...
>
> I guess you might be able to show that a given closed-source
> application depends on the GPL ODBC driver if it uses
> PostgreSQL-specific SQL/features and doesn't work for some reason with
> the current LGPL ODBC driver. Still seems like a bit of a stretch.

I am not a lawyer, but...

Essentially you're correct IMO - ODBC apps do not link against the
driver itself, thus there is no closed/open source GPL issue. That only
comes into play if you use a GPL *driver manager* (both iODBC and
unixODBC are LGPL anyway, so that should be a non-issue as well). On a
Windows system the worst that would happen is that you would distribute
your application and get the users to download the driver themselves,
just to be safe.

Regards, Dave