BDB license (was: Using Derby as a binary store)

[Kasper Nielsen <ne...@kav.dk>]

Dyre.Tjeldvoll@Sun.COM wrote:
> Kasper Nielsen <ne...@kav.dk> writes:
> 
>> David Van Couvering wrote:
>>> To be honest, this looks more like a job for BDB than for Derby.  I
>>> would love to see the Derby store API made public at some point, but
>>> currently it's not public and I suspect it may be difficult to work
>>> with.  Are there reasons BDB/Java won't work for you?
>> Not besides the license:)
>>
>> Its for an BSD licensed project, so BDB is pretty much out of the picture.
> 
> According to David's recent blog
> 
> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/davidvc/archive/2006/11/oracle_benchmar_1.html
> 
> "The BDB license is clear: if your product that uses BDB is
> closed-source, or you want indemnification, then you need to us pony
> up $$$ for the commercial license. If your product is open source, you
> can use the BDB open source license, which is a variant of a BSD
> license."
> 
> So if your project is BSD also, shouldn't you be able to use BDB in
> it?

The BDB license is a viral license much like GPL and in fact was 
designed to be identical in effect with the GPL. But for some historical 
reasons they didn't choose GPL. So if you include BDB in your library. 
Anybody using your library would need to make their application open 
source.

Now, I'm no expert on licenses. But wouldn't the following scenario be 
allowed? In fact I don't see any difference compared to how you would 
use MySQL or PostgreSQL from within a Java application.

Launch a process with a standalone BDB database with a small (open 
sourced) network layer on top. Then launch your application (in another 
process) which would use a another small network layer to communicate 
with the BDB process. There would probably be some overhead involved 
with using local socket communication. But probably not much compared to 
  disk latency.

Of course the application would require two VM instances but for some 
applications that might not be a problem. Perhaps you could even launch 
the BDB database from within your own program. So users wouldn't need to 
start both manually.

Cheers
  Kasper