On Tuesday, 31. July 2007 at 3:04 pm, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> On Jul 31, 2007, at 5:02 AM, Thomas Lotterer wrote:
>> On Monday, 30. July 2007 at 9:26 pm, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>>> On Jul 30, 2007, at 2:58 PM, Thomas Lotterer wrote:
>>>> Decision:
>>>> - exclusively use Berkeley DB
>>>
>>> Alternatives to Berkeley DB for the 3-4 usage cases:
>>>     1) licensing
>>>
>> What's the issue here?
> 
> rpm using Berkeley DB cannot be used by commercial vendors who do not
> have a Berkeley DB license.
> 
My understanding is: commercial is not really the issue, keeping code
(fragments) from a redistributed product "Closed Source" is. If you
build an application with BDB and use it in a closed user group (company
internal installation, even if it provides public services) then you can
do so, vanilla or modified. If you build an application with BDB and
distribute your code "Open Source" then you can do so, too. Only if you
build an application with BDB and distribute your code "Closed Source"
then you must ask the IP owner of BDB for permission. This is currently
Oracle and they'll grant you permission in exchange of $$.

Most of the above (with BDB and Oracle being examples only) also applies
to any GPL or otherwise copyleft protected code.

According to our RPM COPYING file the lib/ is GPL or LGPL and everything
else is GPL. I question whether the contents of lib/ alone are useful
for anything standalone. So RPM is GPL and again, most of the paragraph
above applies. Only worse, because if you want to distribute your code
"Closed Source" then there is no single entity to ask for permission.

> The intent in rpm has _ALWAYS_ been to be free for commercial use.
> 
Possible as described. The code being redistributed must be "Open
Source". Makes commercial use almost impossible, of course.

> [...] GPL licensed code cannot be used. I would have used wget [...]
> libxml2
> 
You can import wget GPL code and libxml2 MIT code. The latter does not
seem to have an advertising clause which would have made it incompatible
with GPL.

RPM is practically GPL. Forever. Neither problem nor advantage with BDB. 

-- 
http://thomas.lotterer.net