Proposed F19 Feature: Replace MySQL with MariaDB

[Tom Lane]

> On 01/28/2013 01:22 PM, Norvald Ryeng wrote:
>> We include the docs because they are useful to users downloading the
>> software directly from dev.mysql.com, even if Fedora and other distros
>> can't redistribute them.
>> 
>> In Debian, recreating the tarball is done by the get-orig-source target
>> in debian/rules, so the manual work has to be done only once. After
>> that, it's all automatic. Is this different with RPMs in Fedora?

The work involved isn't the issue (and yes, it is reasonably well
automated).  Rather the problem is loss of easy traceability of the
source tarball.  Someone who wants to verify that I didn't tamper with
the rest of the tarball contents while removing the docs has to work
harder than just comparing tarball checksums.

Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> writes:
> Is anything preventing you from providing a configure option?

A configure option would hardly help --- the point here is that we can't
ship even source tarballs that contain the docs, because of the license
problem.

What I would see as a good-faith gesture on Oracle's part would be to
relicense the docs under the same license as the source code, or some
other redistribution-friendly license such as Creative Commons.  AIUI
the reason for the current restrictive license is that back in the day,
MySQL AB felt they had to be restrictive to support their business model
of the time.  Surely Oracle is not getting any significant income from
licensing the mysql docs anymore.

This is of course hardly the biggest issue involved with Oracle's
handling of mysql vis-a-vis downstream packagers.  But if there were
to be an attempt to deal with the docs licensing problem in particular,
that would be a good solution from my standpoint.

			regards, tom lane