A specific proposal on licensing

[Josh Berkus]

All:

I wanted to post this based on a discussion in Bradley's presentation
yesterday on the project here at SCALE.

I would like the *accounting library* to be licensed LGPL.  My reason is
that I want to write software which embeds the library which is under a
different open source license, such as BSD.

If the library is licensed AGPL, I believe that it will fail in its
purpose as a library because it will be exclusively reserved to people
who want to write AGPL applications, which however you cut it is a
minority of developers.  This is, after all, the reason why the LGPL
exists; because more restrictive versions of GPL licenses are not
compatible with library usage.

This is distinct from the eventual NPO accounting *application*, which
should probably be AGPL because Blackbaud.

Bradley argued that "we can wait until someone comes to us and wants to
build something to relicense".  I believe that's a huge mistake; the
majority of potential downstream application builders will dismiss the
project without ever contacting us if the license is wrong.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com