Slick Extensions Licensing Change

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Stefan Zeiger

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Feb 1, 2016, 11:52:20 AM2/1/16
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Slick Extensions Licensing Change

Because nearly every application is driven by some sort of data source, we invested in building Slick, a Functional Relational Mapping (FRM) library for Scala that makes it easy to work with relational databases.

Over the past four years we have made significant improvements to Slick. Most recently, making database access more Reactive by adding asynchronous stream processing with non-blocking back-pressure when accessing any of the supported JDBC-based database systems.

As Slick has matured, so has the Scala community. We are proud that our Slick database drivers have become stable commodities for Scala developers and, as stewards for a number of open source technologies, we and the community believe that open sourcing Slick Extensions is now appropriate.

Historically Slick Extensions, which provides drivers for commercial databases (Oracle, IBM DB/2, and Microsoft SQL Server) were licensed free for development and required a commercial license for production. Moving forward, Typesafe is donating Slick Extensions to core Slick, and they are now subsequently available under the Open Source terms for both development and production use. The drivers will be integrated into the core Slick project in the next release.

Our goal now becomes supporting a vibrant community of contributors to enhance the future of Slick. To this end we are going to expand the group of core committers to include members of the community outside of Typesafe and EPFL. We will instigate a proper community process that allows the evolution of Slick to be guided by the community.

Slick remains part of the Typesafe Reactive Platform, including the open sourced versions of the previously commercial database drivers. Customers will benefit from the same level of support as before, while gaining the ability to examine and debug issues more easily on their own due to having access to the entire source code.

Typesafe will continue to manage the release timeframe and announcements, allowing us to maintain the level of quality associated with a project under the Typesafe umbrella.

--
Stefan Zeiger
Slick Tech Lead
Typesafe - Build Reactive Apps!
Twitter: @StefanZeiger

clude zhu

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Feb 4, 2016, 11:00:57 AM2/4/16
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GOOOD news!. we are just on refactoring our system for performance purpose. due to historical reason we still need to keep using oracle in in our new scala based framework.  It's a good news for us to make a decision on choosing slick as our db model's engine.

Victor Roman

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Feb 4, 2016, 2:53:05 PM2/4/16
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NICE!!!

Awesome news! Thank you!

Jochen

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Feb 8, 2016, 4:44:04 PM2/8/16
to Slick / ScalaQuery

Thanks! Very good news! 

Thomas Lockney

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Feb 15, 2016, 4:07:09 PM2/15/16
to Slick / ScalaQuery
We have some minor confusion about this change. In the blog post and mailing list post, you write:


On Monday, February 1, 2016 at 8:52:20 AM UTC-8, Stefan Zeiger wrote:
Moving forward, Typesafe is donating Slick Extensions to core Slick, and they are now subsequently available under the Open Source terms for both development and production use. The drivers will be integrated into the core Slick project in the next release.

Does that mean that existing versions are free for commercial use or that they will be free with the next release? 

Lutz Hühnken

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Feb 20, 2016, 6:04:23 AM2/20/16
to Slick / ScalaQuery

The latter. The license of "Slick Extensions" (the existing versions) remains unchanged. But the sources have been merged into the main Slick project with https://github.com/slick/slick/pull/1427 where the open source Slick license applies, and will be in the next open source Slick release.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

Thomas Lockney

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Feb 20, 2016, 2:11:50 PM2/20/16
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It's the phrase "they are now subsequently available under the Open Source terms" that confused me. That certainly sounds like from the point of the announcement forward they are available for commercial use. 

Sorry if anyone thinks I'm nitpicking here, but this could severely impact a project we're about to ship to production, so... getting clarity from Typesafe would be fantastic.

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Stefan Zeiger

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Feb 20, 2016, 2:55:48 PM2/20/16
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On Saturday, February 20, 2016 at 8:11:50 PM UTC+1, Thomas Lockney wrote:
It's the phrase "they are now subsequently available under the Open Source terms" that confused me. That certainly sounds like from the point of the announcement forward they are available for commercial use. 

Sorry if anyone thinks I'm nitpicking here, but this could severely impact a project we're about to ship to production, so... getting clarity from Typesafe would be fantastic.

As Lutz already mentioned, there is no change to the licensing of the existing releases of the separate "Slick Extensions" project. All code from this project has been merged back into the main Slick project where it is available under a BSD license. There will not be any further releases of Slick Extensions (unless required under support contracts for the current and older versions) as a separate project.

You can build from the Slick master branch and use the open sourced drivers immediately for production use. There is no official release with these drivers yet but it will be part of the next open source release and also find its way into a future Reactive Platform LTS branch.

BTW, integrating Slick Extensions into Slick's build and test infrastructure required a bunch of refactoring, so I did it together with the changes required to build it on master. Backporting it to the 3.1 branch should be relatively straight-forward (the main incompatible changes in master are caused by renaming Slick "drivers" to "profiles" for 3.2). If anyone wants to do this, I'd be happy to merge a PR and cut a release.

Thomas Lockney

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Feb 20, 2016, 6:46:29 PM2/20/16
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On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Stefan Zeiger <stefan...@typesafe.com> wrote:
On Saturday, February 20, 2016 at 8:11:50 PM UTC+1, Thomas Lockney wrote:
As Lutz already mentioned, there is no change to the licensing of the existing releases of the separate "Slick Extensions" project. All code from this project has been merged back into the main Slick project where it is available under a BSD license. There will not be any further releases of Slick Extensions (unless required under support contracts for the current and older versions) as a separate project.

Ok, that makes sense. I appreciate the clarification. 
 
BTW, integrating Slick Extensions into Slick's build and test infrastructure required a bunch of refactoring, so I did it together with the changes required to build it on master. Backporting it to the 3.1 branch should be relatively straight-forward (the main incompatible changes in master are caused by renaming Slick "drivers" to "profiles" for 3.2). If anyone wants to do this, I'd be happy to merge a PR and cut a release.

I may investigate that option, actually. We'll see if time permits.
 

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