On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 6:57 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>
> I notice that there are more than a few projects on pgfoundry that are
> marked as "BSD licence" but then the project files don't contain any
> mention of the licence details. In some cases, projects are also clearly
> marked Copyright of people or organizations.
I agree that projects should make their licence clear. Gurjeet and I
were just talking about this in relation to Slony, which has only a
copy of the PostgreSQL licence tucked away in an SGML file in the guts
of the tarball, with no text at all to say it's the licence used for
Slony, and not just for PG.
> For example, pg_batch is clearly marked "BSD licence", yet the docs and
> many of the files are marked "Copyright (c) 2010, NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND
> TELEPHONE CORPORATION".
Don't mix up copyright and licence. They are not the same thing at all.
> pg_lesslog does contain a BSD-looking licence in the COPYRIGHT file, but
> is also marked with copyrights.
>
> My understanding is that we had a policy of copyright novation to the
> PGDG. Is that not followed up for pgfoundry projects? I think we should
> move to a policy of explicit licencing.
No - pgFoundry projects are licenced and copyright-attributed as their
authors see fit (as long as it's an open source licence of course).
> In the absence of a licence file, when a project is marked "BSD licence"
> on pgfoundry I think it is safe to presume that the licence for those
> files is the same as PostgreSQL's licence.
The PostgreSQL Licence is not the same as any of the BSD variants, so
that is not a safe presumption to make.
--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company