Although we haven't made an official announcement about this yet I thought I'd mention it: after a lot of discussion, both internally at Aduna and with various co-developers and users of Sesame outside Aduna, we have decided to change the open source license under which Sesame will be distributed.
Previously, Sesame has always been distributed under the GNU LGPL license. Although we have always interpreted this license as a very free license that allows reuse of Sesame as a library in any kind of client application, some users were wary of the consequences of including LPGL in our code. I don't particularly want to discuss here whether or not they are right of being wary, but it's a fact that it prevented some people from using Sesame.
So we have decided to move Sesame to a less restrictive license, namely a BSD license (that's about as unrestrictive as you can get I guess, bar public domain). The current Sesame 2 code base has been adapted (headers, license text) and the next releases of Sesame 2 (including the alpha-4 release that will be released this week) will all be available under BSD. Existing releases (including all Sesame 1 releases) will stay available under LGPL only for now.
The main difference between the licenses is that LGPL has a reciprocity-clause which BSD does not: basically, if you change something in Sesame and you distribute that changed version, the LGPL requires you to release the changed version as LPGL and so contribute the change back to the community. BSD does not require this.
I'm personally very happy with this decision. A license that is as free as possible allows as many people as possible to use and co-develop on Sesame. A broad user base for Sesame is in our best interest of course, both as developers (more bug-reports and hopefully more fixes) and as a company (more uptake means more exposure). Of course it also neatly ties in with Aduna's strategy of releasing all Aduna software as open source.
I'm not particularly worried about people taking our stuff and improving it without giving back: the history of many other BSD-licensed projects indicates that when developers get excited over a piece of software, they are typically happy to contribute, regardless of what the license requires. So now our main goal is to get as many developers as possible excited about Sesame 2 :)
