Re: proposed improvements to PostgreSQL license

Camm Maguire writes:

> As would mine. The major cost associated with any software project is
> the migration/learning curve time. Effective guarantees that this
> time investment will have a long payoff period (i.e. there will be no
> forced upgrades, mandatory incompatibilities, binary/linked library
> legacy issues, proprietary usurpation, and disappearance of the
> product altogether) are critical to the decision to begin putting
> software into production.

I don't see your point. The current BSD license does, all in all, allow
you to do whatever you want with the product. So there will be no:

* forced upgrades (No one can force you to upgrade.)

* mandatory incompatibilities (No one can mandate anything, you can fix
everything yourself.)

* disappearance of the product (If you have the source, you have it and
can continue to develop it.)

You seem to be believing that with the BSD license someone can take over
the product and retroactively re-license it. This is false on both counts:
No one can take it over unless he buys out the copyright of each
contributor (but no open source license prevents that), and no one can
revoke the currently granted license. (Well, there is a faction of legal
experts that believe that gratis licenses are revokable, but then every
such license would be affected.)

> As I see it, the only realistic objection to the GPL comes from those
> who want to sell copies of the software, or software products based
> upon it.

The major pragmatic objection to the GPL license has been that it creates
legal hassles which we currently don't have. If we allow anyone to use the
product at will then we don't have anything to enforce. If we cover our
own work with a bunch of conditions then we always have to worry about
what we can do with the code and what we can't.

> Most people in the "business community" have no such interest,

But some do and there's no point in stopping them.

--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net 75262 Uppsala
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