Today I was going to compile dash cryptcoin from the sources.

Debian ships Berkeley DB version 5.3 by default so the configure script of dash argued that it likes version 4.8 for portability reasons.

Too bad that current Debian version don’t ship 4.8 anymore. What’s worse thought is that 4.8 and 5.x packages are mutually exclusive as I discovered by naively adding squeezy repositories to the sources available in my machine. I quite ignore the reason why two major release of a library can’t live side by side. It has been made for decades with many other libraries, Gtk 2 and 3 are the first example I can recall.

So studying how to solve the issue I discovered that Oracle which I thought to have an odi-et-amo attitude toward free-as-in-freedom software.

In fact I somehow convinced myself that Oracle loved non-copyleft sw preferring such licences over the GNU General Public License.

I was wrong as Oracle released the latest version of BDB under Affero-GPL, which is – as far as I know – the license that strives to protect the liberty of people using the software it protects.

You may be surprised to discover that Debian do not and plan not to include any AGPL-released Berkeley DB library:

RM: db6.0 — ROM; AfferoGPL not compatible with many packages and we don’t want to have more than 1 Berkeley DB in the archive

 Hi, I hereby request the package to be remove due the license change that is incompatible with many packages that use Berkeley DB library. And I certainly don’t want to have more than one Berkeley DB package in the archive due the database format incompatibility. Thus please remove the package and never allow it back, unless there’s a package it requires Berkeley DB 6.0+ (in that case I would suggest to add agpl into library name… something like this libdb-6.0-agpl). Ccing to ftpmaster, so they can make the notes when accepting/rejecting packages.

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We believe that the bug you reported is now fixed; the following package(s) have been removed from unstable:

I dare say that I was quite mithereda[^1] discovering Debian that willfully choose not to include an AGPL library. I hope I have misunderstood the issue.

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p class=”message”>[^1]: to mither:  to make a fuss, to pester.