licensing implications

[Konstantin Svist]

Don Russell wrote:
> IANAL...
>
> If a company has a commercial software product using some proprietary 
> database, and they want to switch to using MySQL, does the GPL license 
> allow them to continue to sell their product just as they did before, 
> or does GPL then mean their entire product has to fall under GPL?
>
> Thanks

ditto, IANAL...

AFAIK:
* If you're not altering MySQL but are interfacing with it (as a normal 
sql client), your product can be licensed as anything.
* If you're altering MySQL code and giving the end result to someone, 
you have to provide the altered code, as it falls under GPL. If you're 
keeping the result for yourself only, you don't have to provide anything 
to anyone (your code supposedly must be GPL'ed, but since you're not 
giving anyone the binaries, you don't have to provide the sources)
* If you're writing a plugin for MySQL - that's a gray area to me.. keep 
asking...

HTH