MySQL 4

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Thomas Zehetbauer <thomasz at hostmaster.org> said:
> RedHat has yet failed to argue the specific issues they have with MySQL
> being GPL licensed.

Wrong.  It has been stated many times in many places the exact problem.
You apparently are choosing to ignore that.  The specific issue is that
the Open Source license that PHP is released under is incompatible with
the GNU GPL.  Since PHP is widely used and is widely used to talk to
MySQL via php-mysql, php-mysql is a required package.  The only way to
follow all appropriate licenses is to link php-mysql against the LGPL
licensed MySQL, version 3.23.

The GPL is incompatible with several Open Source licenses (such as the
original BSD license that is still widely used by other software).  For
most software, this isn't a problem because most programs aren't
directly linked together.  For libraries, you have to pay attention.

> > Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Again you aren't qualified to
> > remark as to what counts as a legally binding licensing agreement.
> 
> And again I doubt that you are. As stated in one of my earlier posts
> this is very likely a issue only a judge can decide on.

You download a source tarball.  It has a file that states the license.
How can it get any clearer?  If MySQL AB wants to release the source
under a new license, they build a new tarball with a new license.

> Correct, but I trust MySQL's lawyers that they have resolved the open
> source linking issues that have been brought to their attention. At
> least the MySQL people show some efforts to resolve the issue while
> RedHat just keeps whining that they have changed the license.

And who do you think is talking with MySQL's lawyers to try to get this
resolved?  BTW it is "Red Hat" (two words).

MySQL AB is not the good guy here in any case.  They have their own
weird interpretations of the GNU GPL.  They used to offer a great
database under the GPL and allow anyone to use it (since the interface
library was under the LGPL), but they wanted to charge for "commercial"
use.  Since there was no way to enforce that, they decided to change the
license on the interface library to the GPL, so that any distributed
code that even talked to their database server would fall under the GPL
unless the distributor bought a non-GPL license.

Under their new license, if I take perl code that uses the DBI module to
talk to a PostgreSQL (or Oracle, etc.) database (but talks "generic"
SQL) and change the connect string to talk to a MySQL 4.0 or later
database, my code now falls under the GPL.  No other database vendor
tries to make that claim to my knowledge.

We use MySQL in a web-hosting environment.  There's no way we'll upgrade
to anything later than 3.23, as any customer writing a program to talk
to the database would have to be aware that their code would fall under
the GPL if they distribute it.  When we decide to make a change, it will
probably be to PostgreSQL or something else, not MySQL 4.0 or later.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.