For Approval: BSD License, PostgreSQL Variant

[Chris Travers]

In response to a number of people in the community (including Rick
Moen) and on the OSI board (including Michael Tiemann) who have
publically stated that products must use OSI-approved licenses in
order to call themselves "open source," I have decided to officially
submit PostgreSQL's license to the OSI for approval.

I do so in the hope that the OSI will use the opportunity to decide on
a unified and resonable statement about what is or is not "open
source" and how this impacts concerns over license proliferation.

My preferred outcome would be for the OSI to drop the pretense that
OSI approved licenses are the only open source licenses available in
an unambiguous statement, as I feel that this would best serve
anti-license-proliferation efforts, and then reject this license on
antiproliferation grounds.  However, as an alternative, I would accept
seeing it approved.  Either way, I do not want there to be any doubt
in any public statements whether this particular project is open
source or not.

For those not aware of PostgreSQL, it is a mature, open source RDBMS
which came out of UC Berkeley.  The license was thus written by the
University of California and conforms without question to the OSD.  It
was the basis for Red Hat Database, and the community regards it as
"The world's most advanced open source RDMBS."  Because the license
text as such is not OSI approved, however, I am sure that there might
be concern on this list that it shouldn't be called open source.
Recent criticism of Microsoft and other vendors for unreleated use of
the term "open source" with regard to OSD-compliant but not
OSI-approved licenses has further pushed for the idea that this
license should be submitted for approval so that there is no doubt in
the minds of anyone that this is in fact open source.

I do not believe that this license offers anything new to the world of
permissive software licenses.  Personally I cannot think of any
instance where it would be functionally different from the X.Org
license, and this may or may not be functionally different from the
MIT license (the only meaningful difference between those licenses is
that the MIT license explicitly grants a sublicense right, while the
X.org license does not).

The license is slightly different from the ISC license in that it
extends to the documentation as well as the software and the
disclaimer section is different.  It is quite different from the "new
BSD" license on opensource.org in structure and organization, and I
believe it is clearer as the requirement that the pemrission grant is
reproduced as a condition of inclusion of code

The text of the license template here is included:

[Program name]

[Portions] Copyright (c) [years] [authors]
...

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement
is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this
paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.

IN NO EVENT SHALL [INITIAL CONTRIBUTOR] BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR
DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING
LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS
DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF [INITIAL CONTRIBUTOR] HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

THE [INITIAL CONTRIBUTOR] SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES,
INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY
AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS
ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND [INITIAL CONTRIBUTOR] HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO
PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.