Re: Berkeley DB 6.0 license change to AGPLv3
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the
> Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users
> interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version
> supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding
> Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source
> from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary
> means of facilitating copying of software.
> It's probably a stretch to claim that users interact with exim, postfix
> and dovecot over the network.
It would be useful to have some clarification of exactly what Oracle means
by that. (The FSF's opinion isn't horribly useful given that they're not
the copyright holders, even if they're the original authors of the
license.)
> In any case, the AGPL does not require that the program be a quine; it'd
> certainly be acceptable for a comment to be output over SMTP (for
> example) with an URL to download the source.
As an upstream for INN, I think doing such a thing would be completely
absurd, and would rather just drop Berkeley DB support entirely and make
everyone switch to a different overview method than do anything of the
sort.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: