Re: Berkeley DB curious licensing practice
On Thursday 31 October 2002 10:35, Bennett Todd wrote:
> 2002-10-31-13:18:24 Sean 'Shaleh' Perry:
> > You only have to give the source to the recipient of a binary.
>
> That sounds like a nice interpretation, but I don't see that on
> their site. I think you're assuming that they want to be open
> source. I think that's a risky assumption.
>
> Instead, what I see is that if you "redistribute", which they define
> to include "copy to servers in different sites within an
> organization", your software must be under an open source license,
> such as the GPL, or any other conforming to the OSD.
>
right. Now, the GPL *only* applies to the recipient of a binary. If that
binary never leaves my company no one outside my company has the right to the
source code.
It is 100% legal to grab an arbitrary piece of GPL software, bring it into a
company, hack the hell out of it and never give the source code to anyone
outside of the company. The key thing to remember -- you only get rights if
you have a binary in your possession. Since this binary actually belongs to
the company and not the sysadmin who installed it he does not get any rights
automatically.
Obviously Sleepcat wants either a) open source or b) more money. But the
current terms do not appear any different than they were before.
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