TDB license (was: Re: tdb performance)

[Michael Still]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Jeremy Allison wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 04:05:07PM -0500, David Chappell wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> So do we. This is why tdb is GPL. We're not going to re-license tdb
> under the LGPL.

My project is licensed under the GPL, so I can appreciate the requirement
to have tdb GPL'ed, and have no problem with that.

It was, however, my understanding that if I had say a BSD licensed
project, then it was still cool to link to a GPL'ed library... So long as
I was to distribute the tdb stuff separately, and not modify it without
releasing those changes. Then again, I am willing to be wrong.

My original question was more of a politeness thing -- I don't want to be
installing libraries named tdb on people machines if that is going to
cause upset for the Samba team.

Mikal

-- 

Michael Still (mikal at stillhq.com)