licensing implications

[John Summerfield]

Tom Holroyd wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 22:15 -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
>   
>> On Thursday 06 March 2008, 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?
>>>       
>> If it links with the MySQL client libraries, then the code so linked must be 
>> GPL.
>>     
>
> But see this:
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-June/268476.html
>
> I've used commercial closed-source software that used MySQL ... that
> company is out of business now so maybe it's bad luck.
>
>   
Some of that document looks decidedly dodgy, and even if correct, one 
would incur a bad reputation.

Giving a choice of existing libraries seems okay, and one could even 
provide mysql binaries and source. Let the client _do_ any linking required.

I note this:
[summer at localhost ~]$ rpm -qi mysql-libs-5.0.51a-1.fc9.x86_64 
php-mysql-5.2.5-6.x86_64 | egrep 'Name|License:'
Name        : mysql-libs                   Relocations: (not relocatable)
Size        : 3869853                          License: GPLv2 with 
exceptions
Name        : php-mysql                    Relocations: (not relocatable)
Size        : 203043                           License: PHP
[summer at localhost ~]$

I imagine that the GPLv2 is so commercial users _need_ the licence, but 
I don't know where that puts php-mysql.

ultimately, one needs guidance from the copyright holder and one's lawyers.