Re:Doubling down on permissive licensing and the Elasticsear...
by yjftsjthsd-h on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:46AM
(#25938666)
That doesn't sound quite right: MIT/BSD licenses are GPL compatible; you could trivially release MIT code under the GPL. I believe that's what https://www.hyperbola.info/ is doing, for example.
Re:Doubling down on permissive licensing and the Elasticsear...
by temp667 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:47PM
(#25945587)
It's compatible, but if Postgresql wanted to go harder copyleft and switch the license for future releases, they'd need to get pretty broad agreement, and that would be difficult, there are a lot of corps / enterprise players in the ecosystem, and things like (a)GPLv3 are often totally banned. Is GPLv3 software even allowed in the Apple iphone App Store? The Windows Phone app store?
In short though - was developed at berkeley so released under a BSD license. The license has served them well (there are a lot of commercial entities supporting postgresql development, and lots of others with various forks). And finally, it would be hard to change at this point and they don't see a gain.
A note - in contrast to Elastic, there is no one copyright holder with postgresql. So this makes it much hard to get a relicense to for example a situation where one commercial entity has a special right to the terms / relicensing power.