On 4/14/07, Joshua D. Drake <..hidden..> wrote:
> Sure you can. Just get permission from the contributors first. There > are companies (like Digium) which do exactly this, but they go about > it in a better way. > > Also some companies, like EnterpriseDB do that with other peoples' > code (again, with their permission). It isn't wrong or underhanded as > long as it is transparent, understood, and legal. Joshua can correct > me if I am wrong, but I believe that "Mammoth PostgreSQL" was licensed > under a proprietary license for a while. Well the key difference here is, PostgreSQL (what Mammoth Replicator and EnterpriseDB are based off of) is BSD licensed. To answer the specific question, yes Mammoth PostgreSQL was closed source, it is more of an auxilary FOSS project now. Mammoth Replicator is still closed source. The BSD explicitly allows us to do as we wish with the code, including fork, close source, mutate etc... LedgerSMB is GPL, which is a whole different legal and ideological mindset, although they are both FOSS.
I am sorry if I was unclear. To me the key issue is permission. To take GPL'd code and make it proprietary, you need separate permission (the kind Innobase/Oracle give to MySQL AB). Mammoth PostgreSQL was proprietary based on permission. My concern with SQL-Ledger was that it wasn't. A lot of my past post falls under the category of "defend whoever isn't in the room as much as is possible." And that means Dieter. I wanted to clarify that the problem as I saw it was not that he relicensed the code but rather that I did not think he likely had permission to do so. Despite the fact that I like the GPL v2, I am not terribly political about it, and I think that authors have a moral right to choose their own licenses provided that their obligations to others are met. The difference between Mammoth PostgreSQL and SQL-Ledger was not in the mindset so much as the fact that Command Prompt fulfilled their responsibilities to other authors while I did not feel Dieter had (and it turned out that I was right). Appologies for any confusion. Best Wishes, Chris Travers