TDB license (was: Re: tdb performance)

[David Chappell]

On Wed, 2002-01-23 at 04:59, Michael Still wrote:

> 
> I have been using it for one of my own open source projects (in the next
> release), and have a few questions...
> 
>  - is it ok for me to release tdb in my own codebase as a convenience
>    library (libtdb?)? Are there any plans to do this for Samba anyway
>    which I might conflict with?
>  - I have developed some basic docbook SGML man pages for the tdb calls
>    I feel I understand well enough, would you like a copy of them?

I have been looking for a simple database that is safe to use for RPC. 
So far I have found only a few.  They are Sleepycat's, SQ Lite, and TDB.

TDB looks very nice and is small while Sleepycat's and SQ Lite look like
overkill, but there is one problem that has so far made me hesitate to
use it.  My project (the PPR print spooler) is distributed under the BSD
license.  If I were to include TDB then, as I understand it, my whole
project would automatically come under the GPL.  Now I have nothing
against the GPL, but I have reasons for wanting to keep this particular
project BSD.

So I think it is a good thing that Samba as a whole is under the GPL,
but I also think it would be nice if TDB were licensed under the LGPL. 
That way, people from other projects who used TDB would still have to
contribute their fixes and improvements but they could still make their
own decisions about how to license their projects.

I understand that Richard Stallman disagrees with this reasoning,
basically because he sees GPL licensed libraries as an incentive to
choose the GPL for new projects.