Re: initdb copyright notice

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> I think there was an updated BSD license approved by Berkeley that
> we are using.

I think this is an area where we need a higher degree of certainty
than that.

> If we took the file unchanged, I would not remove the copyright
> because it is the file _unchanged_, no?

It's the license, not the copyright attribution, that is the
question. I also don't see how it makes any difference whether the
files are modified (although at least some of these files _have_ been
modified since being imported: e.g. src/port/qsort.c).

To summarize, my understanding is that there are two problems:

   (1) Some of the files in the main source tree are 4 clause
       BSD. Since PostgreSQL is "derived" from these files, we fall
       under its licensing restrictions, namely the advertising
       clause.

       We can solve this by getting the license on these files changed
       to 3 clause BSD, or by removing the files from the
       tree. Checking the current NetBSD CVS tree, it seems that they
       switched to 3 clause BSD at some point after we imported the
       files in question:

           http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/stdlib/qsort.c

       So it seems kosher to change the license on the NetBSD-derived
       files to 3 clause BSD. That leaves the contrib/ stuff, but
       since we still have GPL licensed code in there, I don't think
       we need worry about it.

   (2) Is the 3 clause BSD license identical to the PostgreSQL
       license? It looks superficially dissimilar to me, but Bruce
       thinks that ours is an "updated" version of the BSD license. If
       that's the case we should be okay; if it's not, we may not
       be. This needs to be confirmed.

(And, of course, IANAL...)

-Neil