FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>]

On Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:58:53 +0300
Steve Teale <steve.teale AT britseyeview.com> wrote:

> I see that MS are threatening a Linux ODBC driver, but only a 64 bit
> one at the moment.

Interesting.  Do tell!  

> What would be your position on licensing if I were to think about
> doing a translation of FreeTDS to D. 

I have very little to say because the code belongs to the authors.
As you can see from the copyright notices, there are quite a few
owners.  I've written quite a lot of it, but I'm mostly a steward.   

The LGPL is pretty liberal; it's hard for me to see what anyone would
object to unless they wanted a purely closed-source product.  FreeTDS
exists because the contributors want to share and learn.  We've turned
down suggestions to support a closed version.  

Technically, though, I don't see where you're going.   If the D
DBMS-interface module is to be able to connect to different servers
(other than TDS servers) it has to speak other wire protocols and use
other ODBC drivers.  Therefore it needs something akin to the dynamic
linking facility provided by a driver manager.  Because it needs to
deal with completely closed drivers (e.g. Microsoft's or Oracle's) the
FreeTDS license seems to me to be unimportant.  

--jkl