Re: Berkeley DB 6.0 license change to AGPLv3
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org> writes:
> Just to clarify – I am not in any way opposed to the hereditary
> properties of (A)GPL. The evil thing is the relicensing at the point
> where people depend on you, and not the license itself.
I don't believe the AGPL was ever intended to be used for libraries.
Quite a bit of the license is very difficult to interpret as applied to a
library. (For example, does that mean that every application using the
library has to provide a URL to download the source of the *library*? Is
the user interacting with the library directly over the network?)
I think this one is all on Oracle. They're using a license that was never
intended for a basic infrastructure library, quite possibly in an attempt
to make it obnoxious and excessively onerous to use the open source
version, or to create a situation where nearly all users of their library
are violating some technical term of the license (or at least are close
enough that a lawsuit wouldn't be immediately thrown out) and therefore
can be shaken down for cash if Oracle feels like it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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