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Re: Berkeley DB 6.0 license change to AGPLv3



Hi Bradley, and thanks for your comments.

On Wed, Jul 03, 2013 at 11:34:38AM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> BTW, I'd suggest a rather unorthodox solution if developers are
> interested: fork this AGPLv3'd version of BDB, and begin making
> substantial improvements and changes under AGPLv3.  That way, Oracle
> isn't the sole copyright holder,

That is a pretty interesting proposal, indeed.

> and if Oracle were to take action under a clause of AGPLv3, other
> copyright holders could intervene and indicate they disagreed with
> Oracle.  If the case went to litigation, Oracle would have a tough
> time because the other copyright holders would be expert witnesses (in
> the USA sense -- not sure what the equivalent is elsewhere in the
> world) who were saying Oracle was acting unfairly and over-reading the
> license terms.  (I'd certainly be willing to be an expert witness as
> the license's co-author in such cases.)

So, I wonder, do we have any idea (due to them having already been
mentioned publicly elsewhere) about the craziest interpretation of AGPL
that the "evil guys" might come up with and, at the other end of the
spectrum, the most restrictive one? AFAIK AGPL hasn't been tested in
court, yet. But I can't help wondering what people are really scared
about here.

Is it the quine scenario (IMHO ruled out by the license text, but
obviously you never know...) that people fear to have to implement,
worrying about the fact that simply providing URLs to tarballs wouldn't
be considered enough? Or is it something else?

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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