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9 Copyright and License

9.1 Elephant Licensing

Elephant is a persistent metaprotocol and object-oriented database for Common Lisp. Detailed information and distributions can be found at http://www.common-lisp.net/project/elephant.

The program is released under the following license:

Elephant users are granted the rights to distribute and use this software as governed by the terms of the Lisp Lesser GNU Public License http://opensource.franz.com/preamble.html, also known as the LLGPL.

Copyrights include:

Original Version, Copyright © 2004 Ben Lee and Andrew Blumberg.
Version 0.5, Copyright © 2006 Robert L. Read.
Versions 0.6-0.9, Copyright © 2006-2007 Ian Eslick and Robert L. Read
Portions copyright respective contributors (see CREDITS).

Portions of the program (namely the C unicode string sorter) are derived from IBM's ICU: ICU Website whose copyright and license follows below.

ICU License - ICU 1.8.1 and later COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSION NOTICE

Copyright (c) 1995-2003 International Business Machines Corporation and others All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, provided that the above copyright notice(s) and this permission notice appear in all copies of the Software and that both the above copyright notice(s) and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR HOLDERS INCLUDED IN THIS NOTICE BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, OR ANY SPECIAL INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization of the copyright holder.

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All trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

9.2 Elephant Manual Copyright and Licensing

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Copyrights include:

Original Version, Copyright © 2004 Ben Lee.
Versions 0.5-0.6, Copyright © 2006 Robert L. Read.
Current Version, Copyright © 2006-2007 Ian Eslick and Robert L. Read

9.3 3rd Party Libraries

Elephant depends on 3rd party lisp libraries. See their respective distributions for detailed copyright and licensing information. The following is a brief summary.

9.4 Data Store Licensing Considerations

The Berkeley DB data store is based on the Berkeley DB C library, now owned by Oracle, but available as GPL'ed software. It is important to understand that applications using Berkeley DB must also be GPL'ed unless you negotiate a commercial license from Oracle. In most interpretations of the license, this includes a requirement to make code available for the entirety of any publicly visible website that is based on Berkeley DB. See

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/htdocs/bdboslicense.html.

The CL-SQL backend, depending on which SQL engine you use, may not carry this restriction and you can easily migrate data between the two. Since the Berkeley DB store is 4-5x faster than SQL, it may make sense to develop under BDB and transition to SQL after you've tuned the performance of the application. Licenses for various SQL engines can be found at: