Fedora Users — Re: licensing implications

Don Russell wrote:

IANAL...
If a company has a commercial software product using some proprietarydatabase, and they want to switch to using MySQL, does the GPL licenseallow 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 normalsql 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'rekeeping the result for yourself only, you don't have to provide anythingto anyone (your code supposedly must be GPL'ed, but since you're notgiving 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.. keepasking...

HTH