[Pkg-db-devel] Bug#256332: clarification of doc licensing for db3/db4.2

[Andreas Barth]

Hi,

sorry for not responding earlier.

* Mike Olson (mike.olson at oracle.com) [060410 03:51]:
> This is going to be some work for me.  Oracle's legal department has been
> very helpful on our open source requests so far, but it's a large team and
> is not familiar with this issue yet.  I'll need to find, then brief, then
> extract approval from, the right people here.
> 
> Before I do that, can I get some kind of authoritative statement from
> Debian that the effort is necessary, and that it will satisfy the concerns
> that have raised this issue for the second time?  I want to be helpful,
> but I want to be sure we are solving the problem here.

Hm, there is some good and bad news on it. First of all, the current
statement in db3/db4.2 doesn't match how we expect documentation to be.
However, beginning from db4.3, this is already fixed, so we don't have
really large problems for future development.

For db3 and db4.2, there are two ways to fix the issue:
* We could stop providing the package for etch (and tell people to use
  db4.3/db4.4 instead).
* Oracle could change the license, e.g. to the one used in db4.3/db4.4.

>From the release team's point of view, it definitly makes sense to
reduce the number of libdb-versions as much as possible. :)

We currently have:
       db3 |        db3 |   3.2.9-25 |      unstable | source
     db4.2 |      db4.2 |  4.2.52-24 |      unstable | source
     db4.3 |      db4.3 |   4.3.29-5 |      unstable | source
     db4.4 |      db4.4 |   4.4.20-4 |      unstable | source

However, given both history and that db4.2 was quite much used in sarge
(and db3 was still in major use), I doubt a bit that we can manage that
in time for etch.


Do you think it is possible without too much effort to adopt the
documentation license from db4.3/db4.4, which reads as:
|  This product and publication is protected by copyright and
|  distributed under licenses restricting its use, copying and
|  distribution. See the LICENSE file in the distribution for further
|  information.
also to the db3/db4.2-packages, where this section reads as:
| This product and publication is protected by copyright and distributed
| under licenses restricting its use, copying and distribution. Permission
| to use this publication or portions of this publication is granted by
| Sleepycat Software provided that the above copyright notice appears in
| all copies and that use of such publications is for non-commercial use
| only and no modifications of the publication is made.


If not, we should consider how to get to the goal with minimum effort on
all sides.

Thanks for your support.


Cheers,
Andi
-- 
  http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/