Legacy approval request - BSD license (PostgreSQL variant)

[Dave Page]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 9:06 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway
<tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 09/24/2009 04:03 PM, Dave Page wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> The PostgreSQL project (http://www.postgresql.org/) originates from
>> Michael Stonebraker's database group at UC Berkeley. The project began
>> in 1986, and was released by the Regents of the University of
>> California in 1996 under a variant of their BSD licence, a copy of
>> which is attached to this message.
>
> It's worth noting that this license is clearly an MIT variant rather
> than a BSD variant. We're tracking it as such in Fedora, and have been
> for several years now.

The license is indeed similar to the MIT, however the disclaimer text
the user is required to include in redistributions (the two paragraphs
in upper case) is distinctly different from that in the MIT license,
so they are not directly interchangeable.

Regardless of legal similarities, historically, the license did
originate from UC Berkeley, though where their lawyers got it from is
anyone's guess. For all I know, MIT may have got it from them and then
popularised a modified version of it :-)

--
Dave Page
PostgreSQL Core Team
http://www.postgresql.org