Re: contrib and licensing

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org>
Cc: "Dann Corbit" <DCorbit@connx.com>, "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>, "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>, "mlw" <pgsql@mohawksoft.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-04-03T05:04:33Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org> writes:
>> And your point is?

> That everyone is being entirely too picky.  Hey, we link against other
> things, too.  Some aren't LGPL.  The readline example is a good one,
> incidentally: it's GPL.

Yeah, it's an excellent example: there is an alternative implementation
under a different license (libedit).

> And its stubs are in the backend, of all places.

Really?  I must have missed that.

> One could clean-room reimplement if the demand is enough.  

Certainly, any of this stuff *could* be reimplemented.  But for stuff
that's being proposed for contrib, what's theoretically possible given
enough demand isn't the important real-world issue.  Contrib stuff is,
by definition, stuff that hasn't yet had all that much work put into it.
So it's appropriate to ask where it can really run *right now*.

			regards, tom lane