[License-discuss] Intimacy in open source

Gil Yehuda gyehuda at oath.com
Thu Jan 10 22:39:01 UTC 2019


This is very helpful, thank you.

I've viewed the process-space of a running process as the way to imagine
the technical boundary suggested by the license text. e.g. if after you
terminate process A, process B remains running, they might not be the same
Work. But when I came upon the phrase "intimate data connection" and
compared it to the operation of a database driver, I was not sure if this
was added to include that case.

I have been suspicious of licensing schemes that rely upon a database
driver having a separate permissive license from the restrictive database
engine for this very reason.

*Gil Yehuda: *I run the open source program office at Yahoo --> Oath -->
Verizon Media.


On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 4:42 PM Luis Villa <luis at lu.is> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 12:43 PM John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 11:36 AM Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <
>> license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>>
>>> When I read this, I interpret *intimate data communication* as the
>>> relationship between a database driver and a database. That's the role of a
>>> driver -- to have intimate communications with the DB so that your calling
>>> application can bind to the driver, not the DB. I'm asking this group: is
>>> my interpretation sound?
>>>
>>>
>> I would interpret it much more narrowly as communication via shared
>> memory: the caller and callee share data structures directly rather than
>> serialized representations of them passed over a pipe of some sort.  A
>> SQLite database is in intimate communication with its driver; most other
>> databases, because they run in separate processes and communicate over
>> sockets, are not.  The FSF's discussion of static and dynamic linking (they
>> consider them equivalent) seems to reinforce this interpretation.
>>
>
> John's understanding is also mine; a well-defined interface is not
> "intimate" in the sense meant here. But not sure I'd want to rely on that
> if I were a business, of course.
>
> Luis
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