On Wed, 2003-12-31 at 15:44, Gerald Henriksen wrote: > the existing license. Attempting to contact everyone who has > contributed to a popular project like PHP is likely impossible, and at > least one is unlikely to be willing to accept a different license. PHP has changed it's licens quite a few times, even to the point of one of its version not being a Free Software license. That's in the past (but not too distant) fortunately. So I guess it is feasible. > >Why do you insist that it is a MySQL licensing problem? I suspect it is > >more a problem of someone being lazy. PHP's faq says: > > It is a MySQL licensing problem because MySQL changed the license. > They had to know this would cause a problem because they went to a > more restrictive license (LGPL -> GPL). > > Presumably this was done to force more people/companies to pay for the > commercial version of MySQL instead of using the free version, but the > net result is that a lot of free software projects can no longer use > MySQL. Wrong in various accounts: a) The "Proprietary" license of MySQL, since Free Software is commercial and even RedHat has distributed MySQL in its commercial context (I bought a few CD's, and they came with MySQL). b) To force more people using the Free Software DB to make non-Free software into paying instead of sucking on their efforts c) only Free Software that is licensed with a GPL incompatible license or that depends on such software has problems with it. Free Software licensed with the GPL or Lesser GPL are a clearly huge amount of programs. > >I particularly like the part: > > > ><<Unix users, at least the ones who know what they are doing, tend to > >always build PHP against their system's libmyqlclient library simply by > >doing --with-mysql=/usr when building PHP.>> > > Yes, in the past with MySQL 3. No, still today. However, they might have to make some changes themselves, like applying patches not distributed or supported by the PHP guys. > However the ones who *really* pay attention won't do it with MySQL 4 > because it violates the MySQL license. Not exactly. The GPL only adds restrictions upon distribution acts. The software that depends on PHP does not link with it. What links with mysql and is being distributed is PHP, and here is the problem. On a personal note, software that doesn't use standard SQL deserves the troubles it's going through right now :) Rui -- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...? Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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