A Change in License for Berkeley DB • Hacker News Board

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#41

Post by anon1385 » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 10:28 AM UTC

Personally I think this is great news. Great news for free software, great news for users, great news for the AGPL. So very few web apps are open source, despite so many of the people who develop them claiming to support free/open source software. It seems that the only way to make the web open source is to force the hand of the developers, and that means we need to start pushing copyleft licences like the AGPL. The GPL was created for a different age. So much of the software people use now runs on a different machine; we can't continue to ignore this loophole.

BDB has had a commercial licence available for a long time, this move just closes a loophole that people were exploiting to use BDB in non-free software without contributing back.

Additionally, to the people saying 'oracle are only doing this to make money', this is one of the ways you are supposed to make money/fund the development of free software. RMS talks about it here: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed. -- RMS

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#42

Post by icebraining » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 10:29 AM UTC

tome wrote: post #37

DrJokepu wrote: post #14

I don't understand the sentiments in this thread. They own the thing. They do whatever they want with it. They have paid good money for it. Yet they have chosen to give it away as free software (with a license even Richard Stallman and the other FSF folks would approve). What is this sense of entitlement here on HN?

> What is this sense of entitlement here on HN? HN (as a general rule) doesn't support free (as in speech) software. It's interesting to contrast Oracle with webapp providers who haved move from free to paid models. HN (as a general rule) supports the latter and responds to the complainers with "you shouldn't have expected anything from a product you weren't paying for".

I don't understand why is that contrast interesting. Most of those webapps were already proprietary, and some of the paid ones are also Free (as in speech), like NewsBlur. They're completely different situations.

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#43

Post by __alexs » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 10:38 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #23

reeses wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with much of this, but mainly on their sales and marketing tactics. However, what does your rationale for finding them reprehensible have to do with the article? The Affero GPL/GPLv3 is arguably the most open source license available.

The Affero GPL has a clause requiring the operators of network servers that use AGPL code to provide full source of the network server. Berkley DB is used in, amongst other places, Subversion - so when they next do a distro upgrade in a few months, a whole bunch of developers are going to find they're no longer license compliant and have no easy way of becoming license compliant.

Unless you are modifying the code the section 13 of the AGPL does not require you to distribute source at all so most distribution users would never notice the difference. I guess this might effect you if you had some crazy internal fork of BerkeleyDB that you were regularly merging upstream into but that doesn't seem like a huge use-case for this software somehow.

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#44

Post by __alexs » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 10:42 AM UTC

Those people who think this is some sort of enormously evil event that will kill BerkeleyDB because the AGPL is the evilest most restrictive free software license ever should probably read Section 13 here http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html

This pretty much only affects you if you are running some weird internal forked version that has upstream merged into it regularly. I don't get the impression that this is a common situation for BDB users.

(Although since Oracle did it it's probably inherently evil anyway of course.)

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#45

Post by glogla » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 10:42 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #23

reeses wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with much of this, but mainly on their sales and marketing tactics. However, what does your rationale for finding them reprehensible have to do with the article? The Affero GPL/GPLv3 is arguably the most open source license available.

The Affero GPL has a clause requiring the operators of network servers that use AGPL code to provide full source of the network server. Berkley DB is used in, amongst other places, Subversion - so when they next do a distro upgrade in a few months, a whole bunch of developers are going to find they're no longer license compliant and have no easy way of becoming license compliant.

That's nonsense.

Using SVN has nothing to do with SVN being under GPL2, GPL3, AGPL, Apache or any other license that allows for free use, as long as you don't modify SVN and distribute (or provision over the network, in case of AGPL) the modified version. Using SVN to hosting your code repository is in no way modifying and distributing it.

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#46

Post by qwerta » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 11:10 AM UTC

My startup works on free alternative (apache licensed) db engine. When I saw title I was really woried they would change license to more liberal. That would affect our future sales seriously. But this is great new for us! :-)

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#47

Post by ExpiredLink » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 12:05 PM UTC

ExpiredLink wrote: post #24

Why do people complain when Oracle changes the license to a Free license? Just kidding. Denounce Oracle but also denounce the "Free" software zealots who invented unfair licenses like AGPL.

To be more precise: AGPL was invented by commercial software vendors to combine the aura of free and open software with a (largely unsuccessful) Shareware/Freemium business model.

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#48

Post by Sanddancer » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:28 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #35

makomk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Affero GPL has a clause requiring the operators of network servers that use AGPL code to provide full source of the network server. Berkley DB is used in, amongst other places, Subversion - so when they next do a distro upgrade in a few months, a whole bunch of developers are going to find they're no longer license compliant and have no easy way of becoming license compliant.

Subversion is Apache licensed, so I fail to see how this would be a problem.

Subversion uses bdb as its backend.

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#49

Post by toyg » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:29 PM UTC

reeses wrote: post #9

beedogs wrote: post #7

What an absolutely horrible company Oracle is. They are without a doubt the biggest enemy to free and open source software, and I'll be glad when they're gone.

I agree with much of this, but mainly on their sales and marketing tactics. However, what does your rationale for finding them reprehensible have to do with the article? The Affero GPL/GPLv3 is arguably the most open source license available.

Apologies, I thought that was exactly the anti-tivo provision of gpl3/agpl ? Not that I've looked too hard, it's really not my field.

Re: A Change in License for Berkeley DB

#50

Post by pyre » Sat, Jul 06, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

anon1385 wrote: post #41

Personally I think this is great news. Great news for free software, great news for users, great news for the AGPL. So very few web apps are open source, despite so many of the people who develop them claiming to support free/open source software. It seems that the only way to make the web open source is to force the hand of the developers, and that means we need to start pushing copyleft licences like the AGPL. The…

  > So very few web apps are open source,
  > despite so many of the people who 
  > develop them claiming to support 
  > free/open source software.

So, if they use GPL'd software, and contribute back to it, but don't release their own software as GPL, then they are just a bunch of 'evil fat cats' that are leeching off of FOSS?