[elephant-devel] BerkeleyDB license (Was: Elephant license)

[Edi Weitz]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:30:08 -0500 (EST), Ben <ben at medianstrip.net> wrote:

> 3) Pay sleepycat.  I don't know how much they cost.

Hi!

I had an email exchange with SleepyCat's sales department concerning
the license situation and I thought I'd give a summary for this list
so everyone who is considering using Elephant for commercial projects
is aware of this.  Please note that this reflects my understanding of
the situation.  IANAL - if in doubt ask SleepyCat yourself.

As a general rule you can use SleepyCat for free if your application
is fully open source - in the case of Lisp this would also include the
Lisp implementation itself, i.e. if you deploy on, say, AllegroCL or
LispWorks your application isn't open source anymore.

If your application is /not/ open source and you distribute it to
customers (which includes alpha/beta releases, giving code to
contractors or affiliates, or access to web applications) you have to
pay SleepyCat - see below.

They have a clause in their license that makes exceptions for Perl and
Python but this clause doesn't apply to Lisp because a Lisp
application maps Berkeley DB into its address space.[1]

So, what does Berkeley DB cost?  Looks like you have several options.
If you want to distribute it with several different applications or
with several copies of one application you might want to look at their
"buyout" offer which is online:

     <http://www.sleepycat.com/pricing/index.shtml>

Another option would be to pay a price per machine, i.e. for each
machine Berkeley DB will be used on you pay a fixed price.  A sample
contract for this option is available here:

     <http://www.sleepycat.com/license/license.pdf>

I was given quotes for this option as well but I'm reluctant to
disclose them here as they're not publicly available.  Let me just say
that if you think AllegroCL is expensive then Berkeley DB is probably
not for you... :)

Of course, there's also the option to negotiate special prices with
SleepyCat - that's up to you.

I have to say that at this moment this means I won't consider the
Elephant/Berkeley DB combo for my Lisp projects because SleepyCat's
pricing scheme doesn't fit for me.  Obviously, this is not a decision
based on the technical merits of Elephant or Berkeley DB.

Hope this info was helpful.

Cheers,
Edi.

[1] As a side note the guy from SleepyCat originally said to me that
    the Perl/Python exception would apply to Lisp as well because it
    generally applies to all "fully interpretative" languages.  I had
    to explain to him that Lisp is a compiled language... :)