Friday 27 March 2009

pgAdmin moves to the BSD licence

After a huge effort over 18 months or more, involving lawyers, negotiations, tons of emails and new-found detective skills, we've finally changed the pgAdmin licence from Artistic v1.0 to the PostgreSQL variant of the BSD licence. The change is partly in response to criticism of the licence by the FSF who described it as "too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear.", but mostly because as a result of those comments (and a court case in the US), Red Hat dropped all Artistic 1.0 licenced packages from Fedora and RHEL.

So, from pgAdmin 1.10 onward the new licence is:

pgAdmin III

Copyright (c) 2002 - 2009, The pgAdmin Development Team

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE PGADMIN DEVELOPMENT TEAM HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.


Many thanks to all the past contributors who gave their consent to change the licence, to the rest of the pgAdmin Development Team for helping out with the grunt work, and to Karen from the Software Freedom Law Center for her sage advice.

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