Subject: Re: typo in the license ?

From: Álvaro Herrera <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 18:19:45 +0300

On 2025-Oct-22, Achilleas Mantzios wrote:

> Greetings from pgconf eu 2025 , Riga, Latvia!
> 
> While attending Karen Sandler's presentation on : The Foundation of Open
> Source: Why Software Freedom? , I just looked up the license here :
> 
> https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/ and then here :
> https://opensource.org/license/postgresql
> 
> the variable $ORGANIZATION is spelled as ORGANIZATION and further below
> as ORGANISATION.

Yes, but:

1. this is a problem in the OSI website, not in the Postgres website or
licensing file.

2. note that this file is not a license, but a license template.  If you
want to use this license, you're supposed to replace those keywords with
the name of your organization.  I would think that if you use the template
and replace $ORGANIZATION with a name but fail to replace $ORGANISATION
with the same name, then your lawyer is not worth very much.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"La primera ley de las demostraciones en vivo es: no trate de usar el sistema.
Escriba un guión que no toque nada para no causar daños." (Jakob Nielsen)

---

From: Álvaro Herrera <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 18:29:56 +0300

> with the same name, then your lawyer is not worth very much.

By the way, here's the email Dave sent to them:
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2009-November/000930.html
Note he consistently used <ORGANISATION>; there were no dollar signs and
there was no ORGANIZATION.  So maybe OSI saw ORGANISATION and though "oh
look, let's fix this typo", changed the first one, and then forgot to
continue reading, because he got distracted changing the < > to dollar
signs.

Somebody joked downthread about Compaq acquiring Digital and failing to
change some license text correctly, in pretty much the same way that OSI
appears to have failed to Americanise the spelling of the Postgres license ...
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2009-November/000931.html

The license was reported approved three months later:
https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2010-February/thread.html

-- 
Álvaro Herrera        Breisgau, Deutschland  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Hay que recordar que la existencia en el cosmos, y particularmente la
elaboración de civilizaciones dentro de él no son, por desgracia,
nada idílicas" (Ijon Tichy)