[valisystem]

It is not the change of license in itself that makes people think it is a questionable move, it is the strategic nature of this decision.

When building a solution/product, you have to choose the components you use, and invest in it, in time and sometimes money, and its technical and legal specificities can have strong implications on your solution.

License change is a hazard than can happen, and it is also one the harder to foresee, and when it happens to a product to you depend on it can have a big impact.

And it is Berkeley DB, same house as BSD known for the ultra permissive license. I wouldn't have anticipated that, and I guess with many others.

Given the fact that you may not be able to move to another product, and that your business may depend on the license permissiveness, it can be assimilated with totally legal, but nonetheless, extortion.

[jasonlotito]

I wish people acted like this when Sparrow essentially stopped being developed. But the collective came back with: "You got what you paid for" and "You can still use it" and "You shouldn't have expected free updates for life."

And when free services shut down, or start charging, they say "If you aren't paying for it, you are the product" or "You can't complain if you didn't pay for it."

So now the same thing happens for the BDB, and people are upset. But it's the same exact thing. Well, except the BDB's older versions are still available with full source available, and there has always been a paid license available. And the AGPL only applies if you are modifying the BDB source.

It's the two-faced nature of this current culture of developers. We'll consume open source products. Hell, we'll contribute back open source tools. Hell, we'll ship it under BSD because we are want to be permissive and "really free." But we won't do it with our real products.

> Given the fact that you may not be able to move to another product, and that your business may depend on the license permissiveness

As has been said time and time again: there is nothing forcing you to upgrade. Nothing forcing you to change. You are free to continue using exactly what have depended on.

[DrJokepu]

BerkeleyDB was distributed with the "Sleepycat License" since 1996 which is similar to GPL in terms of permissiveness so it's not like BerkeleyDB has been distributed with a permissive license in the past. If the Sleepycat License suits your needs but for some reason AGPL doesn't, why don't you just take the last Sleepycat-licensed version and keep using that? It still does everything it did when it was released. People could even fork it and make improvements to it.