Re: Licenses..

On Jul 22, 2004, at 12:24 PM, Gilles Detillieux wrote:

> My understanding, though I may be wrong (Geoff Hutchison could provide
> the definitive answer), is that the 3.1.x code base does not include
> any extensions or customisations to the Sleepycat Berkeley DB code,

This is correct. Over the 3.1.x series I think I made one update to the 
Sleepycat code when there were some significant bug fixes and it would 
not break database compatibility.

In the 3.1.x series, the db/ directory is a completely unmodified 
Berkeley DB distribution. The ChangeLog should give information on 
which version has been used, but I seem to remember it's something 
around version 3 of the Sleepycat releases.

> It is also my understanding that Sleepycat's license for DB is 
> compatible
> with GPL, but not LGPL.

That is correct.

> It's a whole other ball of wax for the 3.2 code base.  There, Neal
> negotiated a special license with Sleepycat that allows us to 
> distribute
> our modified DB code with the LGPL'ed 3.2 ht://Dig code, provided the
> bundled DB code is used only for ht://Dig or libhtdig.  If it's 
> unbundled,
> it reverts to Sleepycat's standard license.

Correct.

So if you're looking at the licenses for htdig-3.1.x, and wonder about 
the licenses in the db/ directory, you should contact Sleepycat with 
questions or check the Debian Berkeley DB packaging for that particular 
version. At one point, I believe the Debian htdig package simply 
required the appropriate BDB version and linked against the shared 
library rather than compile htdig with the db/ directory.

The main reasons we packaged the two together in the 3.1.x releases 
were that:
a) At the time, not as many people had the Berkeley DB code and it 
would be a bit of a pain to grab another package, install it, then 
install htdig. (This of course is much easier with packaging systems.)
b) It ensured that everyone running htdig was using the same version of 
the BDB and so we wouldn't have to do lots of extra testing for any 
bugs that cropped up with newer BDB versions and/or the interface code.

-Geoff



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