[Pipet Devel] XML database woes

Brad Chapman chapmanb at arches.uga.edu
Thu Jan 6 04:30:23 EST 2000


>"Tim (not representing his employer's opinions)" wrote:
>>
>> > XDBM is another.  It was mentioned here a few months back and then
>>again by
>> > Tim.  Unfortunately, it has the wacky QPL license: End users can run
>>it for
>> > free, but developers have to pay $300-500 per developer, per year.
>>
>> This is not true.  Look carefully at the license; if you are writing
>> Free software compliant with their definition, then you only need pay
>> these fees in the event you want paid support.
>
>Okay, here's the part in question:
>
>
>The phrase 'This fee also entitles the licensee to...' implies that the fee is
>not strictly _for_ the purpose of support.  The word 'also' makes the sentence
>read as if the fee is initially for something else...'THEN you can ALSO get
>free e-mail support...'
>

Reading the licensing info on this makes my head hurt, but if you look at
the main Bowerbird page (http://www.bowerbird.com.au/) I think they spell
out the licensing issues pretty clearly:

Bowerbird Computing specialises in producing high quality XML tools. All of
our products are free software. That is, with our products you have the
freedom to modify the programs and can share your modifications freely with
others. As a result of this you can also download, use and redistribute our
software for no cost.

The one restriction with this is that if you wish to release non-free
versions of our software or link our software with your non-free program
then you must
pay us a fee for doing so. See our licensing page for more information.
Purchasing a proprietary license also entitles you to free email support
from the programmers who wrote the software you are using.

To me, this reads that since Loci is freely available, we would not have to
pay any licensing fees. It seems like you only have to pay if you use XDBM
to build a commercial program, but not to build an open source program.

Brad







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