On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Joseph Adams <joeyadams3.14159@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 12:38 AM, Joseph Adams
> <joeyadams3.14159@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Here's one thing I'm worried about: the bison/flex code in your patch
>> looks rather similar to the code in
>> http://www.jsonlint.com/bin/jsonval.tgz , which is licensed under the
>> GPL. In particular, the incorrect number regex I discussed above can
>> also be found in jsonval verbatim. However, because there are a lot
>> of differences in both the bison and flex code now, I'm not sure
>> they're close enough to be "copied", but I am not a lawyer. It might
>> be a good idea to contact Ben Spencer and ask him for permission to
>> license our modified version of the code under PostgreSQL's more
>> relaxed license, just to be on the safe side.
>
> With the help and motivation of David Fetter, I sent an e-mail to Ben
> Spencer (google "jsonval", check out the git repo, and look in the git
> log to find his e-mail address) a few minutes ago, asking if he would
> license jsonval under a license compatible with PostgreSQL, and am
> currently awaiting a response.
>
> If he doesn't respond, or outright refuses (which I, for one, doubt
> will happen), my fallback plan is to rewrite the JSON validation code
> by drawing from my original code (meaning it won't be in bison/flex)
> and post a patch for it. Unfortunately, it seems to me that there
> aren't very many ways of expressing a JSON parser in bison/flex, and
> thus the idea of JSON parsing with bison/flex is effectively locked
> down by the GPL unless we can get a more permissive license for
> jsonval. But, I am not a lawyer.
If someone who hasn't looked at the GPL code sits down and codes
something up based on the json.org home page, it's hard to imagine how
anyone could be grumpy about that. But we do need to be at some
points to make sure that anything we do is truly clean-room, because
we simply can't have GPL code creeping into our code base.
Thanks for continuing to pursue this!
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company