Hi,
Florian Weimer has correctly pointed out that Oracle has decided to change the BDB 6.0 license to AGPLv3 (https://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/bdb/2013-June/000056.html). This hasn't been reflected in release tarball (probably by mistake), but since the AGPLv3 is not very friendly to downstream projects, we (as the Debian project) need to take a decision.
My opinion is that this Oracle move just sent the Berkeley DB to oblivion, and Berkeley DB will be less and less used (or replaced by something else).
What we can do right now (more can apply):
[ ] Keep db5.3 for jessie
[ ] Keep db5.3 for jessie+
[ ] Keep db5.3 forever
[ ] Suck it and relicense the downstream software as appropriate
[ ] Block db6.0 and higher from entering Debian
[ ] Remove Berkeley DB support from jessie+
[ ] Remove Berkeley DB support from jessie++[ ] Replace Berkeley DB with free alternative [*][ ] Somebody writes a BDB-compatible wrapper around the free alternative(s)
As far as I am aware the most prominent users[1][2][3] of Berkeley DB are moving away from the library anyway, so this might not be a big deal after all.
1. openldap has mdb
2. cyrus-imapd has skiplist
3. subversion has moved to fsfs long time ago
I am attaching list of affected software generated by:
dak rm -Rn -s unstable db-defaults db5.1 db5.3 > db-depends
< db-depends grep : | grep -Ev "^($| |#|Dependency problem found.|Will remove the following packages from unstable:|Maintainer:)" | sed -e "s/\\[.*\\]//" | cut -f 1 -d: | sort -u > package.list
# chroot to unstable system<package.list dd-list -i > affected.list
* - f.e. kyotocabinet is GPL with FOSS and Linking exception (http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.org/changelogs/main/k/kyotocabinet/unstable_copyright)
kyotocabinet is a sister of tokyocabinet:
http://tokyocabinet.sourceforge.net/benchmark.pdforhttp://www.dmo.ca/blog/benchmarking-hash-databases-on-large-data/
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>