[stephth]

you don't need to pay anyone to use it in your commercial software.

[newhouseb]

I suppose if you are shipping proprietary binaries, then yes. But otherwise it's effectively GPL'ed.

[stephth]

Exactly. BDB is GPL with an (non-publicly priced) commercial license to embed in apps, and LevelDB is BSD. With LevelDb, one of the most practical use case of a serverless db - embedding it in a client-side application - isn't crippled by it's own license.