Guido van Rossum wrote:
What's the license on the BerkeleyDB code from Sleepycat?
There are two licenses: One that they call the "open source license", see
http://www.sleepycat.com/license.net
There is also a commercial license.
Can we legally distribute RPMs or other binaries containing it? (I thought there were some restrictions that make it not open source.)
It depends. This is the condition:
# Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on # how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any # accompanying software that uses the DB software. The source code # must either be included in the distribution or be available for no # more than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee, and must be # freely redistributable under reasonable conditions.
So distributing Python itself should be no problem.
It's similar to GPL's "copyleft". I think it's no different from what we do with e.g. GNU readline, so I think it's okay. Redistributors of Python in binary form will have to beware though. I wonder if we're on thin ice with the RPMs (since we don't clarify any of this)?
... but we're not including readline in the standard Python distribution. Why would we want to include the database code itself in Python ? -- Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH _______________________________________________________________________ eGenix.com -- Makers of the Python mx Extensions: mxDateTime,mxODBC,... Python Consulting: http://www.egenix.com/ Python Software: http://www.egenix.com/files/python/