Nice to see a company so consistently living up to its reputation.
And one simply must appreciate the elegant irony of using a strong copyleft license as a dagger.
That's always been one of the ways to make money from free software. Mysql did the same thing, and I think Qt did as well at some point in its history. If I recall correctly, even RMS sort of approves of it.
Downvoters: go read some history, there's nothing factually incorrect in what I wrote above. The bozo proliferation seems to continue unabated here:-(
Here's RMS himself: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
On the contrary Qt changed the license from GPL to LGPL what definitely helped the proliferation (and the survival after the Nokia disaster).
MySQL ... well moving this to AGPL would give MariaDB the final push it needs (if it still needs one). So they just let it rot.
Too bad there was no equivalent project for BerkeleyDB.
Also, a relatively restrictive (not BSD!) license has been a feature of Berkeley DB for a while:
> Tupl is a high-performance, concurrent, transactional, scalable, low-level database. Intended to replace BerkeleyDB, Tupl supports true record-level locking. Unlike BerkeleyDB-JE, Tupl doesn't suffer from garbage collection pauses with very large databases. Tupl also includes support for cursors, upgradable locks, deadlock detection, hot backups, striped files, encryption, nested transaction scopes, and direct lock control.
Well, Berkeley DB was already a copyleft library[1] (basically a BSD/MIT-style license with an extra copyleft clause). So, unless you had a commercial DB license, you already had to provide the source code for applications that used it. This 'just' extends it to applications that are used over a network.
[1] From the Berkeley DB license:
3. Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any accompanying software that uses the DB software. The source code must either be included in the distribution or be available for no more than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee, and must be freely redistributable under reasonable conditions. [...]
For most companies the open source version was not acceptable anyway. E.g. most customers with sensitive information (such as government organizations) require on-site firewalled installations of your software anyway. So, you either pony up the relatively high per-CPU cost, or use a less restrictively licensed alternative such as leveldb.
This change will mostly make a difference for web applications. But my point was that Berkeley DB was already licensed quite restrictively before, contrary to some people's beliefs.
Calling the client portion of the code of an SaaS application "the client half" is a stretch. 1% is a better estimate, and "1%-distribution" is a better word than "half-distribution". The client portion of code has its source distributed at the same time as when it runs on the browser.
> That just brings the license up to date with the original intent
The only clue to intent users of software have is the specific wording of the license. Changing the license cripples the software. How do we know the original intent wasn't to bait users in with an wrongly used license, then change it later on?