Re: Official ODBC announcement

>>The driver is still Open Source and still free to those who will be
>>using or creating software that is GPL compatible.
>
>
>From what I understand of how the GPL applies; closed source software
> will still be able to use a GPL ODBC driver without any issues at all.

IANAL but my understanding is that you would not be able to create
a piece of software that links (shared or otherwise) to the ODBC driver
unless the license you were using for that software was GPL compatible.

This is one of the reasons that libc and GTK are LGPL on Linux.

  > I can definitely understand the benefit of commercial support.
>
> Why would the ability to distribute the ODBC driver without having to
> distribute source be something that a company is willing to pay money for?

We have customers that don't want to have to make their software GPL
compatible. They are willing to pay reasonable fees to not only help us
develop a driver for the overall good of the project but also to have
certain commercial rights that would not be there if they used the GPL
version.

> What do you see as the business (or community) advantage of this?

The business advantage is a $ equation that allows someone like
Command Prompt to provide continual support for the driver. The ODBC
driver (at least for us) doesn't have any secondary revenue streams.
Unlike something like plPHP where we can get residual
coding dollars from being the definitive experts in plPHP.

The ODBC driver is just that, a driver. If it works it doesn't need
support except for continued development and bugfixing.

The community is going to receive a top notch driver, with commercial
support behind it that allows the community as a whole to continue to grow.

The reality is, PostgreSQL on Windows is severely hampered without an
ODBC driver. In time this will not be the case because things will move
to .Net but that move, in majority is still some time off.

> Do you expect that the amount of commercial interest in licensing the
> ODBC driver itself will compensate for the lack of contributions and
> potential issues in community support that it will cause?

I see very little problem that the community will have when they
actually analyze the situation. Command Prompt would never request
that a community member give up ownership of their code. We also would
not suggest that a community member not be able to reuse their
code in anyway that they see fit.

Our thought process at this point is that a community member would
license the code back to us so it could be included not only in the GPL
version but our closed source version as well.

> Lastly, why would the program support 8.x+ only? If you are using libpq
> I would image that supporting 7.x+ would be trivial (and necessary).

Well I don't see it as necessary but it may be trivial. Our thought
process is that the majority of the people who are going to need this
driver are going to be running Windows and thus 8.x.

Also by the time we release 1.0 and especially 2.0 8.1 will be out. That
puts us smack dab into 7.4 getting old. We had to pick a version,
we picked 8 :).

However if there is enough community interest we can definately
reconsider that decision.

> Overall though, the idea is great and PostgreSQL really does need a
> robust and well supported ODBC driver.

That was our thoughts as well.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake
Command Prompt, Inc.


>
> I look forward to your response,
> Max
>
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