RE: Berkeley DB

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 10:32 AM 8/12/99 -0400, Ronald E. Fortin wrote: 
> That's a very interesting question. If I ship OpenLDAP with a product
> just so that customers, who do not have an LDAP server themselves,
> can install it easier from my distribution than having to get/build/install
> it themselves, am I in violation of the license?

If you derive some software from OpenLDAP software, you must adhere
not only to the terms of OpenLDAP license, but terms of placed upon
portions of OpenLDAP by copyright holders of these portions.  If
you derive an executable from OpenLDAP software and 3rd party
libraries, you must adhere to all the terms that apply.

As you can see, it get complicated really fast.  It is the sole
responsibility of the distributor to ensure all terms are met.

> Only OpenLDAP uses BerkeleyDB, and it is freely available,
> the rest of the fictional product does not.

When you build OpenLDAP, you derive a executable.  You become
responsible for ensuring that terms of all copyrights/licenses
that apply to the executable are met.  Under the Sleepycat
copyright, you are distributing software (the slapd/ldbm tool
executables) that use Berkeley DB software.  As such, you must
ensure that the executable and/or documentation associated with
it reproduces the Sleepycat copyright statement.  In addition,
you must ensure that all the source for the software used by
these executables are freely available.   That is, if you
link OpenLDAP with BerkeleyDB and some proprietary (non-system)
library, you are responsible to ensure that source for
the proprietary library is also freely available.

Though this sounds bad, it is workable.   Distributing
OpenLDAP executables linked with GDBM or other GPL'ed libraries
is actually much less workable.

Kurt