On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 22:56 +0900, John Summerfield wrote: > 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. php-mysql falls under MySQL's open-source exception clause, referenced elsewhere in the thread. In fact, the exception clause was the outcome of long, involved negotiation to make sure that php-mysql could still be distributed, even though MySQL was changed from LGPLv2 to GPLv2. > > ultimately, one needs guidance from the copyright holder and one's lawyers. > > > -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Mathematical Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
