Copyright vs Licence

On 5/10/21 4:34 AM, Vijaykumar Jain wrote:

Hi All,

I have been playing around with the pg_auto_failover extension by citus
and have really enjoyed playing chaos with it.
citusdata/pg_auto_failover: Postgres extension and service for automated
failover and high-availability (github.com)
<https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover&gt;

Now I see this at the bottom of this extension.
This may be a stupid question, but i ask coz i have worked with OSS that
been marked EOL or dead.
Some software have started asking for fee (like oracle for supported java)
Some software which were completely open sourced for unlimited usage (like
sensu) now have a new version which has limited/capped free usage.
Or the Google vs Oracle case.

I know I can make a city of postgresql clusters of various sharded
architectures, and it will still be free and postgresql is not responsible
for any damage etc i understand, but can the extensions later charge on
usage model.

*Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This project is licensed under the PostgreSQL License, see LICENSE file
for details.
*
I have a lame query (but i have a concern wrt how oracle acquired products
licenses changed)

What is the role of copyright in a license. (I am not sure if i am even
framing the question correctly, but let me know if i am not).

Copyright establishes who wrote the software, and thus prevents others from
copying it (substantively) verbatim and then claiming it as their own.  Only
the copyright owner can license the software for someone else to use.

Can I be charged for whatever reasons in the future for using this extension.

If MSFT is the sole holder of the copyright, then they can relicense it as
they see fit. *I think* that they can only change the license on *newer*
versions, so you'd be able to keep using the latest OSS version.

Of course, IANAL so take what I write with a spoonful of salt.

--
Angular momentum makes the world go 'round.

If MSFT is the sole holder of the copyright, then they can relicense
it as they see fit. *I think* that they can only change the license on
*newer* versions, so you'd be able to keep using the latest OSS version.

That is correct. If I get a version 1 of your program under license A
you can't come back a year later and tell me the same code is now
licensed under B and hinder the original freedoms of the license.

What can and does happen is that a new version is released under a
different license while the old version is made obsolete. In real word
that means you are stuck with the old version so you either need to
upgrade to a newer version with different license or use something else.
Real world cases are MongoDB and Redis modules license change.

What can and does happen is that a new version is released under a

different license while the old version is made obsolete.

It is often more than just 'made obsolete', updates to other parts of the
OS (that are almost impossible to avoid installing) can make it so those
older products either don't run or run VERY inefficiently.

The Wall Street Journal is paying close attention to the Apple/Epic
lawsuit, it may create some interesting (which far too frequently means
'bad for consumers') case law regarding what 'ownership' means these days.
Mike Nolan