Re: Berkeley DB 6.0 license change to AGPLv3

[Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 12:27 AM, Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 02, 2013 at 02:48:18PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> If the relicensing is real and not another misconfiguration of the
> build/release system (like with MySQL docs), this sounds like a
> shakedown for proprietary users of Berkeley DB.  GPLv2-licensed users
> are collateral damage.

People have pointed out upthread that Oracle does not appear to be the
sole copyright holder of BerkelyDB.  So unless they had copyright
assignments or similar on file, maybe a viable route would be to contact
those additional copyright holders and suggest they complain to Oracle
in order to get their relicensing reversed.

This should probably be done in coordination with the wider Free
Software community.

From my understanding, the other copyright holders' opinion doesn't really matter – even if they relicense just the parts they own the whole work will be distributed under stricter license (e.g. AGPLv3). But feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

O.

--
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>