[Mulgara-dev] License Question.

Ian Boston ian at caret.cam.ac.uk
Mon Oct 23 22:45:52 UTC 2006


I have read with horror the history of how Mulgara came into life, and I 
believe that you have made the right decision. I am working as part of 
the Opensource project, www.sakaiproject.org. We have some 60 
Universities world wide contributing, and a handful of commercial 
affiliates also contributing. We use an Apache style license... and now 
the problem.

We want to use a highly scalable triple store, we thought Kowali with 
its MPL license was suitable, but having seen the behavior of a certain 
corps legal department, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm since then, 
I'm not so certain that we should follow Kowari.

We have great difficulty using an opensource license with GPL like 
statements (eg OSL-v3 clause 1c) since it would force the few commercial 
affiliates to opensource all there code. The core community, with about 
2M line of code has little interest in forcing them to do this, as, in 
order to get support, they tend to do it anyway. (and if they dont, we 
could change the API's :) under them. )

On the other hand I absolutely understand why Mulgara would want to make 
certain that all commercial or other users of Mulgara opensource all 
their code.

So my question,
Would it be acceptable to use the Driver code for Mulgara and obviously, 
bind to that code....
and
1. continue to use an Apache style license
2. not require others who deploy the code bundle, containing those 
bindings to opensource their code.
---------------------

When we have asked this same question of LGPL licensed code, in general, 
the authors have confirmed that we are Ok to use their jars in this 
form. We also deploy on MySQL, but the JDBC bindings to the MySQL 
drivers are loose, so we can just ask deployers to download their own 
jars. Presumably a similar loose binding would resolver the issue in the 
case of Mulgara.

As you might have guessed, I'm not a lawyer (thankfully) but I dont want 
to commit the development time if I'm going to find that a lawyer 
prevents us from using Mulgara.

Thanks
Ian Boston



More information about the Mulgara-dev mailing list