[Pkg-db-devel] Bug#256332: clarification of doc licensing for db3/db4.2

Mike Olson mike.olson at oracle.com
Thu Apr 6 18:13:30 UTC 2006


dann frazier wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 05:37:11AM -0700, Mike Olson wrote:
>> Sleepycat didn't, and Oracle doesn't, have any issue with the
>> inclusion of the documentation with Debian, for any current or
>> past release.  The Debian team raised an issue of compatibility.
>> In addressing it, we agreed to use the identical license for
>> software and documentation.
>>
>> We didn't retroactively change licenses granted to earlier
>> releases, because that was never raised as an issue.  For
>> simplicity, I would recommend moving to the later release
>> of Berkeley DB -- 4.3 has the same license for docs and code.
>>
>> Again, you needn't be concerned about compatibility on the
>> part of the developer here; I believe this is an internal
>> issue for the Debian legal and licensing team, not one raised
>> by us.
> 
> Thank you for your quick reply Mike.
> The reason I am asking for clarification is that the current stable
> and development releases of Debian still include both the db3 and
> db4.2 packages.  However, it is not obvious which license is
> applicable to the documentation in these older releases since they
> include both the legal.html and license.html files.
> 
> If the non-commercial clause in the legal.html file applies to these
> releases, Debian will likely need to generate updated packages that
> remove this documentation.

If you're going to rev the packages in any case, I'd strongly
recommend simply moving to the 4.3 (or better, 4.4) release.
We would expect no functional problems, you'd get all the latest
fixes and the doc licensing issue would simply go away.

If this is a huge hassle for you guys, I can work with Oracle
legal to see if we can simply apply the current license terms
to the earlier release docs.  This ought to be no problem -- if
this were just Sleepycat I would do it without hesitation, but
I'll need to brief counsel at Oracle on the issue and rationale
to get this done.  That may take me some time, and I do want
to be sensitive to your release issues and schedules.

Let me know how you prefer to proceed.

					mike




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