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@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@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.
