4 Replies Latest reply on Oct 3, 2013 2:30 PM by JesúsCea

    Re-licensing Berkeley DB back to

    f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd
    f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd Sep 10, 2013 2:23 PM

      Hi guys,

       

      I'm not sure if this has already been discussed here or even if this is right place to request such thing. If there is a better place, just point me there, please.

       

      My question is simple -- can upstream even think about re-licensing Berkeley DB 6.0 back to LGPLv2? It's not hard to imagine how many problems with licensing incompatibility were introduced by re-licensing Berkeley DB to AGPLv3. There are so many projects that use Berkeley DB and cannot be re-licensed as well, which basically means Berkeley DB started to die since 6.0, because such projects will need to switch to some alternative.. If this was desired by upstream to remove BDB from real life, then I can understand it. But anyway, I'd like to hear there is no way to convince upstream to re-licence back.

       

      Regards,

       

      Honza

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        • 1. Re: Re-licensing Berkeley DB back to
          userBDBDMS-Oracle
          userBDBDMS-Oracle Sep 11, 2013 3:06 PM (in response to f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd)

          Hi Honza,

           

             Thank you for your feedback on the license change.    We are in the process of evaluating the licensing incompatibilities introduced by the re-licensing to AGPLv3 and looking at the different alternatives.    It would be very useful to have a better understanding of the different projects that use BDB and what 'flavor' of BDB they use.   BDB is available as Data Store (DS), Concurrent Data Store (CDS),  Transactional Data Store (TDS), and High Availability (HA).  Maybe we can use this thread to start to collect such information.

           

          thanks

          minke  

          • 2. Re: Re-licensing Berkeley DB back to
            f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd
            f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd Sep 12, 2013 1:52 PM (in response to userBDBDMS-Oracle)

            Speaking about Fedora projects very generally after quick look-up it seems that all modes are used quite a lot, except HA. IIUIC, projects sometimes use CDS and TDS only as a better alternative or in the opposite way, DS is used if CDS/TDS are not available. These are some quick look-up results without any guarantee:

             

            389-ds-base TDB
            clisp TDB
            hail TDB
            libsolv CDB
            subversion TDB
            nvi DS
            openldap TDB
            openser TDB/CDB
            opensips CDB
            pam_abl TDB
            sks TDB/CDB
            spamprobe CDB
            squidGuard DS
            cyrus-imapd TDB
            open-cobol CDB

            • 3. Re: Re-licensing Berkeley DB back to
              userBDBDMS-Oracle
              userBDBDMS-Oracle Sep 12, 2013 2:43 PM (in response to f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd)

              thank you very much for the feedback.  I want to leave this thread open a bit to see what else comes in.

               

              many thanks

              mike


              • 4. Re: Re-licensing Berkeley DB back to
                JesúsCea
                JesúsCea Oct 3, 2013 2:30 PM (in response to f503f03a-c957-4464-897e-405775b8acfd)

                I am Jesús Cea, maintainer of the Python Berkeley DB bindings.

                 

                The bindings are licensed as BSD 3-clauses, so my code is incompatible with BDB 6.0. No Python program, under any license, can use BDB 6.0, then. I can't change the license because it is inherited code and it is impossible to contact with every past author.

                 

                I plan to do a release that ONLY allow linking with BDB 6.0 IF you define a environment variable saying "yes, I have a Oracle commercial license for this". Ugly and hacky, but hopefully safe for everybody.

                 

                Personaly I use Berkeley DB HA and two phases commit A LOT in my internal projects. It is my main mode, in fact. I use it for everything, from mail storage to application deployment.