Re: User locks code

Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>

From: Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: "Mikheev, Vadim" <vmikheev@SECTORBASE.COM>, "'Bruce Momjian'" <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, Massimo Dal Zotto <dz@cs.unitn.it>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2001-08-24T02:25:06Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> I definitely agree with Vadim here: it's fairly silly that the
> contrib userlock code is GPL'd, when it consists only of a few dozen
> lines of wrapper for the real functionality that's in the main backend.

As it seems a generally useful feature, it could at least be LGPL'd so 
that linking to it won't force the whole backend under GPL.

> The only thing this licensing setup can accomplish is to discourage
> people from using the userlock code; what's the value of that?

Maybe it makes Massimo feel good ? It seems a worhty reason to me, as 
he has contributed a lot of useful stuff over the time.

I really think that mixing licences inside one program is bad, if not
for 
any other reason then for confusing people and making them have
discussions 
like this.

> Besides, anyone who actually wanted to use the userlock code would need
> only to write their own wrapper functions to get around the GPL license.

This is a part of copyright law that eludes me - can i write a
replacement
function for something so simple that it can essentially be done in one 
way only (like incrementing a value by one) ?

-----------------
Hannu