[Asterisk-Dev] RE: Asterisk license (fwd)

[Steven Critchfield]

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 15:09, Chris Albertson wrote:
> >  .... Of course a database 
> > abstraction layer would be nice, so CDR logging could occur to any
> > kind of 
> > database (oracle, yum!) but these things take a little time.
> 
> You don't really need an abstraction layer if you write the database
> routines using "embedded SQL" as embeded SQL is an ANSI standard that
> is the same between Ocacle, PostgreSQL and others.  Switching between
> DBMSes would then be a configure option that results in changes to the
> Makefile.
> Also notice that by using embeded SQL there is no PostgreSQL, Ocacle or
> Sybase library code in the Asterisk codebase

While the code may be clean at the text level, but at any usable state
it would contain headers and data structures from the database being
used, not to mention being linked to that database client libraries.
This is not an option. 

You run into a similar problem with abstraction layers too. You either
take a penalty hit for going to ODBC and have the problem of finding one
that supports the commercial license of Digium, or you link to the
client libraries yourself and again deal with license issues. Luckily
postgres is BSD licensed and therefore fine for including in asterisk.
You may even find some other databases that are similarly licensed and
want to use them.  
-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>