I am the maintainer of Berkeley DB packages in the Fedora Linux distribution and would like to discuss some issues with the current upstream versions of BDB since your project is also using it. I am not sure whether I am in the correct channel to talk about things such as these as I haven't found a proper mailing list, so please point me in the right direction if this should be discussed elsewhere.
With the license of Berkeley DB version 6 having changed to a more restrictive AGPL license, which is legally incompatible with most of the projects currently using BDB, Fedora's long term goal is to get rid of BDB completely. As Trusted QSL is one of the projects still dependent on BDB in Fedora, I would like to ask you about the status of BDB in the project.
Do you have any plans to migrate to a different back-end or will you be staying on an older BDB release for the time being?
I have created a list of BDB alternatives [1] you might be interested in if you are not planning to migrate to anything specific yet and want to see what is available.
Short term, we'll probably stay with BDB 5 as there's nothing in version 6 that's needed.
Moving to LMDB seems like the path of least effort, but that's going to require migration, with both bdb and lmdb built in to a utility that can unload the bdb database and write an lmdb version. Alternatively, I could just build with lmdb and abandon the existing database and create an (empty) one. This wouldn't necessarily be a fatal problem - all that would happen is that
But, then again, I'm not a licensing expert. My quick research on AGPL shows no incompatibility with usage within TQSL. We don't modify the code and use the libraries distributed with the OS in most cases. As long as there's still a version of bdb around we can continue to use that.
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I am not a license guy either so I can't help you there. I can point you to debian-legal mailing list where I have found some discussions regarding AGPL in general. A discussion specific to the BDB relicensing issue can be found over here. [1]
BDB version 5 won't be maintained for long and probably won't get forked by the community as other alternatives exists (again, mainly LMDB) so it might be painful to stay on an older BDB release in long term.
Thanks, Petr - that thread is long and a bit contentious, but it's clear that getting off of BDB needs to get done for the next TQSL release. LMDB is good from a feature standpoint and won't require major recoding, but this is going to take a couple of releases. Next release adds LMDB as the default database, with upgrade from BDB to LMDB; the release after that drops BDB.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hello everyone,
I am the maintainer of Berkeley DB packages in the Fedora Linux distribution and would like to discuss some issues with the current upstream versions of BDB since your project is also using it. I am not sure whether I am in the correct channel to talk about things such as these as I haven't found a proper mailing list, so please point me in the right direction if this should be discussed elsewhere.
With the license of Berkeley DB version 6 having changed to a more restrictive AGPL license, which is legally incompatible with most of the projects currently using BDB, Fedora's long term goal is to get rid of BDB completely. As Trusted QSL is one of the projects still dependent on BDB in Fedora, I would like to ask you about the status of BDB in the project.
Do you have any plans to migrate to a different back-end or will you be staying on an older BDB release for the time being?
I have created a list of BDB alternatives [1] you might be interested in if you are not planning to migrate to anything specific yet and want to see what is available.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pkubat/BerkeleyDB_alternatives
Short term, we'll probably stay with BDB 5 as there's nothing in version 6 that's needed.
Moving to LMDB seems like the path of least effort, but that's going to require migration, with both bdb and lmdb built in to a utility that can unload the bdb database and write an lmdb version. Alternatively, I could just build with lmdb and abandon the existing database and create an (empty) one. This wouldn't necessarily be a fatal problem - all that would happen is that
But, then again, I'm not a licensing expert. My quick research on AGPL shows no incompatibility with usage within TQSL. We don't modify the code and use the libraries distributed with the OS in most cases. As long as there's still a version of bdb around we can continue to use that.
Finishing the dangling sentence: "all that would happen is that duplicate and changed contacts wouldn't be detected."
I am not a license guy either so I can't help you there. I can point you to debian-legal mailing list where I have found some discussions regarding AGPL in general. A discussion specific to the BDB relicensing issue can be found over here. [1]
BDB version 5 won't be maintained for long and probably won't get forked by the community as other alternatives exists (again, mainly LMDB) so it might be painful to stay on an older BDB release in long term.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2013/07/msg00000.html
Thanks, Petr - that thread is long and a bit contentious, but it's clear that getting off of BDB needs to get done for the next TQSL release. LMDB is good from a feature standpoint and won't require major recoding, but this is going to take a couple of releases. Next release adds LMDB as the default database, with upgrade from BDB to LMDB; the release after that drops BDB.