On Tuesday, 31. July 2007 at 10:07 pm, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> On Jul 31, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Thomas Lotterer wrote:
>> My understanding is: commercial is not really the issue, keeping code
>> (fragments) from a redistributed product "Closed Source" is. [lengthy
>> copyleft explanation attempt]
> 
> I'm told otherwise by a certain Apple VP who shall remain nameless.
> Presumably Apple has lawyers ...
> 
Lawyer -> VP -> Jeff is a lot of "Chinese Whispers" already.

On January 09, 2005 Michael Olson of Sleepycat said in an interview in
IT Manager's Journal http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/feature/2872 
> We use a viral license, so if the vendor wants to make their product
> available as open source that's fine, but if they don't, then they need to
> relicense from us under a proprietary license. [...] Functionally, our
> license is the same as the GPL.

>> According to our RPM COPYING file the lib/ is GPL or LGPL and everything
>> else is GPL.
> 
> The rpm5.org fork is LGPL only, and I know personally the intent, because I
> have been forbidden to use GPL implementations while working at Red Hat, that
> the intent in rpm has _ALWAYS_ been LGPL.
> 
F***, I opened Pandora's box. This issue needs to be fixed quickly. It is a
major problem talking about one license intent but shipping tarballs with
divergent documentation. I hope you have or get all the IP to make the switch.

> The issue under discussion is the Berkeley DB license for "exclusive"
> use in an rpmdb. Having an alternative sqlite is useful for
> "commercial" use cases no matter if the implementation cannot use the
> full power of SQL.
> 
Now we get to the point. Painful and slow. SQL is the good reason. A BDB
replacement without licensing issues is the real reason. Understood.

> If you want to change to GPL for rpm5.org, then by all means, start a
> different thread.
> 
I don't want to change. I just read the documentation. That's what all
technicians should do and all their lawyers will do if it matters.

>> RPM is practically GPL. Forever.
> 
> "Practically" is meaningless wrto licensing. Let's at least be rationale ...
> 
That statement was of course based on what is actually written down. And
"practically" meant that the LGPL exception for the lib/ folder doesn't help
in real life aka "practice". I'm glad to see licensing being cleaned up.

-- 
http://thomas.lotterer.net