Oliver Wolff wrote:

>
> First citation: "New code modules added to Firebird are licensed under
> the Initial Developer's Public License. (IDPL). The original modules
> released by Inprise are licensed under the InterBase Public License
> v.1.0. Both licences are modified versions of the Mozilla Public
> License v.1.1."

The license model is Mozilla, which allows unrestricted redeployment of
the code in source or binary format, regardless of the application in
which the code will be used - commercial, open source, freeware,
whatever. IPL and IDPL all give the same redeployment rights.


So why the license proliferation? The Mozilla license gives special
rights to Netscape - including the right to provide different licenses
and credit for the original development of the code. So, when Inprise
(the name Borland was using at the time) decided to release InterBase as
an open source program, they modified the license to give them the
rights that the Mozilla license gives to Netscape. OK so far? Then
Inprise changed their minds about open source and Firebird emerged as an
independent project. We didn't see any particular reason to attribute
our code to Inprise or give them special rights, which caused the IDPL
to appear.

>
> My special case is:
> What I understood so far is, that we can use Firebird for our office
> to develop our product in this way of "commercial use".
> But we sell a 3-tier-architecture j2ee software product, which needs a
> rdbms as backend. We would glad to offer the customer to install at
> their company the complete appserver (jboss) and rdbms (firebird),
> that they can use it for no pricing. Is this allowed with the
> underlying licenses? I didn't got it.

Bundle the whole thing and distribute it with your application if that's
easier than forcing customers to download pieces individually. The
Firebird installation is designed to be integrated into another
installation and can run silently.

Regards,


Ann