FreeTDS Development Group

[Greg Beeley <gbeeley AT ix.netcom.com>]

Brian Bruns wrote:

> 2.1 because it conflicts with the GPL/LGPL licenses and prohibits the
> addition of other similar protocols in the same library, which is overly
> prohibitive.

> Anybody have any others?

Also in section 2.1 was the part about not allowing the "TDS program" to
allow use of the "TDS protocol" with other programs which are not "TDS
programs", thus (I'm not a lawyer so I may be misreading this) disallowing
the building of a library, JDBC driver, ODBC driver, etc.

I was also uncomfortable with the way the termination conditions were
specified... "remaining inventory" is meaningless for FreeTDS, and if the
license expires in two years, causing the cessation of use of all "TDS
Source Code", FreeTDS would essentially become a dead project at that
point.  Am I reading the agreement right there?  I know that a while 
back there was a lot of squawking about termination conditions in one
of IBM's source code licenses.

It seems as if the TDS spec license was almost geared more towards 
Sybase licensees paying for the use of the spec and thus committing to
"pay for upgrades" every couple of years.

I don't mind Sybase putting language in the license to encourage implementors
to quickly proceed to adding new-major-version functionality when it comes
out, but there are definitely risks if 1) the license becomes more 
restrictive for the next version, 2) another version doesn't come out 
within two years, or 3) the next version isn't freely available.

Thanks, 

Greg.

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