Justin Clift wrote:
> For another perspective, we've been getting a few requests per day
> through the PostgreSQL Advocacy and Marketing site's request form along
> the lines of:
>
> "Is there a license fee for using PostgreSQL? We'd like to distribute
> it with our XYZ product that needs a database."
>
> Probably about 4 or so per day like this at present. A lot of the
> people sending these emails appear to have windows based products that
> need a database, and have heard of PostgreSQL being a database that they
> don't need to pay license fee's for. They've kind of missed the point
> of Open Source from the purist point of view, but it's still working for
> them. ;-)
If they are:
a) not clueful enough to actually look at the license, and
b) looking at it from the purely selfish perspective of "not having to
pay license fees,"
then are they /truly/ people where it is useful to put effort into being
helpful?
Furthermore, if their lawyers are incapable of reading the license and
explaining to them "You don't have to pay," I'd suggest the thought that
maybe they have bigger problems than you can possibly solve for them.
The great security quote of recent days is thus:
"If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be
hacked." -- Richard Clarke
The analagous thing might be:
"If you spend more on coffee than you do on getting proper legal advice
about software licenses, then it's just possible that you might do
something DOWNRIGHT STUPID and get yourself in a whole barrel of legal
hot water."
If these people are incapable of reading software licenses, and haven't
any competent legal counsel to to do it for them, you've got to wonder
if they are competent to sell licenses to their own software. I
seriously doubt that they are.
Furthermore, I'm not at all sure that it is wise for you to even /try/
to give them any guidance in this, beyond giving them a URL to the
license, and saying "Have your lawyer read this." If you start giving
them interpretations of the license, that smacks of "giving legal
advice," and bar associations tend to frown on that.
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