[Zope] Summary of DB Discussion

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
> Christopher Petrilli <petrilli@digicool.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 11/9/99 7:45 PM, Anthony Baxter at anthony@interlink.com.au wrote:
> >
> > > I'm not sure that this is true - there are a number of ODBC drivers on
> > > Unix, some are open source, and mxODBC interfaces them to Python. ODBC
> > > drivers for databases are available in some cases.
> >
> > People have asked why we don't use mxODBC, a simple reading of the license
> > would explain this.  The licenses are incompatible.  Alas! We'd love to hae
> > someone else develop this.
> 
> Looking at the license from Marc-André's starship site
> (http://starship.python.net/~lemburg/):
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Redistribution of this software or modifications thereof for commercial use
> requires a separate license which must be negotiated with the author. As a
> guideline, packaging the module and documentation with other free software
> will be possible without fee or royalty as described above. This license does
> not allow you to ship this software as part of a product that you sell.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> If Zope doesn't qualify as "free software" here (I don't know if he means only
> GPL, or if Zope's "OpenSource" designation is enough), why not ask about
> licensing the code compatibly for use with Zope (a la Medusa)?
> 
> Even in the worst case, I believe Zope could bundle a DA for mxODBC, and require
> that the user install mxODBC separately.

I've had this dicussion quite a few times before. I am willing to
make mxODBC free for use in Open Source products like Zope. Use
for other purposes would not be covered by the license though, so
you can't just extract it from Zope and use it separately. DC didn't
like this, so we didn't come to an agreement. That's just about what
sums up this discussion.

Note that mxODBC will go commercial with the 2.0 release. It'll be
free for non-commercial use and there'll be a small fee for commercial
installations. I have to take this step to finance further development
on it, because keeping up to ODBC and the fast moving RDMS market
has become way too time consuming. Sorry, but that's the way it
goes...

As result of this funding I expect to be able to include new cool
features (hooks into the data conversion process, bulk operation support,
ODBC bridging, etc.) and support for even more database backends.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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