On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> The COPYRIGHT file shows that VMware is claiming copyright on unstated
> parts of the code for this. As such, its not a normal submission to
> the PostgreSQL project, which involves placing copyright with the
> PGDG.
Fwiw I was under the same misconception when I started at Google. But
this is wrong.
We have no copyright assignments to any entity named PGDG. All the
code is copyright the original authors. The PGDG is just a collective
noun for all the the people and organizations who have contributed to
Postgres. As long as all those people or organizations release the
code under the Postgres license then Postgres is ok with it. They
retain ownership of the copyright for the code they wrote but we don't
generally note it at that level of detail and just say everything is
owned by the PGDG.
I'm not a lawyer and I make no judgement on how solid a practice this
is but that's VMware doesn't seem to be doing anything special here.
They can retain copyright ownership of their contributions as long as
they're happy releasing it under the Postgres copyright. Ideally they
wold also be happy with a copyright notice that includes all of the
PGDG just to reduce the maintenance headache.
--
greg