[docs] [issue14759] Berkeley DB License conditions are onerous (and poorly documented)

[Jeff Laing]

New submission from Jeff Laing <jefflaing at gmail.com>:

As part of an audit of license compliance, I was looking at the terms in the LICENSE.txt that describe the Berkeley DB product.  I had thought this would be under the standard Berkeley license, but Oracle have added their own zinger.

* 3. 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, my application, which embeds Python (rather than running it as python.exe) and includes the standard runtime library, must distribute my source code.

This page:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-September/082316.html

suggests that this is not the case for regular Python, but it makes no statement about "embedding".  Sadly the Oracle page it links to suggesting this is not an issue, does not exist.

The general "License" page on the Python websites makes no reference whatsoever to Berkeley DB license obligations.

I note that there are other modules mentioned on the Licenses webpage that are not in the LICENSES.txt file, and vice versa.  I have no idea whether this is deliberate, or an oversight.

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 160238
nosy: Jeff.Laing, docs at python
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Berkeley DB License conditions are onerous (and poorly documented)
type: enhancement
versions: Python 2.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue14759>
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