Licencing issues

[Rami Ojares]

Hi Dave,

I was wondering if you have ever considered that does Rel insulate it's users from the strict copyleft nature of Oracle's BDB licence?
I mean Oracle licences BDB with SleepyCat lisence.
It says that "our open source license permits you to use Berkeley DB ... at no charge under the condition that if you use the software in an application you redistribute, the complete source code for your application must be available and freely redistributable under reasonable conditions."

Now if my application uses Rel which uses BDB then since Rel uses Apache licence I don't have to open-source my software, even though I redistribute BDB inside of Rel, right?
Can you say with confidence that this is the case?

[Dave]

I am not a lawyer. If you have concerns with software licensing, I strongly recommend consulting legal experts. Sorry I can't be more help than that!

[Rami Ojares]

I sent Oracle a mail asking this question but have received no answer after 3 weeks of waiting.
Anyway I have googled the issue and my current interpretation is that Sleepycat licence is problematic.

Wikipedia says: "The license is a strong form of copyleft because it mandates that redistributions in any form not only include the source code of Berkeley DB, but also "any accompanying software that uses the DB software".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_License

Also attorney Tennille Christensen has written a blog entry warning about this licence.
http://techlawgarden.com/blog/?p=1252

I posted also there my question but it is still waiting for moderation.

Therefore my current understanding is that if I were now to incorporate Rel as part of my product and distribute my product to some client
I would have to purchase a commercial licence from Oracle for BDB. Thus the Apache licence might mislead some Rel users because
Rel works only with BDB.

[Dave]

That may be the case. As I am not a lawyer, I can neither confirm nor deny it. A future version of Rel will almost certainly switch from using the Berkeley DB Java Edition to something else, if for no other reason than to support nested transactions. However, I cannot predict when that might be. As Rel is primarily employed as a stand-alone teaching and research tool -- where Oracle licensing on the Berkeley DB is not a problem -- resolving legal issues related to embedding it in other products is not currently a high priority.

[Rami Ojares]

Yes absolutely. I just wanted to share my thoughts in case someone else is wondering about similar issues.