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.

StackBuilder updates - now with added .NET!!

I finally got time to publish a round of StackBuilder package updates, as well as publish a new package - Npgsql 2.0.4. Npgsql is a mature and well maintained .NET data provider that works with Microsoft .NET and Mono. More information can be found on the project's pgFoundry page and website.

Npgsql 2.0.4 is available through StackBuilder for Windows, Linux 32/64bit and Mac OS X.

Other updates to existing packages for all four platforms are:

phpBB 3.0.4-1
Drupal 6.10-1
mediaWiki 1.14.0-1

Enjoy :-)

Sony game using Postgres technology

Seeing as I've got a few minutes spare having just announced the next pgAdmin beta (checkout the Visual Tour), I figured it was about time for quick blog post to prove I am still alive :-p

Some people will certainly be aware that Sony Online Entertainment are a customer of EnterpriseDB and use our PostgreSQL-derived Postgres Plus Advanced Server product as the database behind a number of the services they offer - none of which I really knew anything about. Well for the first time I can actually point to one of their new games called Free Realms which is built on Advanced Server. I can't say I'm a gamer so I won't even try anything like a review, but it looks like some serious work has gone into it, and I can imagine my kids spending far too much time on it given half a chance!

For an open-source geek this is pretty cool stuff, right up there with Yahoo's use of pgAdmin with their massive Everest database - forget unseen financial systems, company CMSs or website shopping carts - this is code I (and many others) have hacked on and is being used to power fun and interesting stuff that potentially appeals to millions of users.

So, feel free to feed my geek ego and check it out :-)