Re: MySQL drops support for most distributions

* John D. Burger (john(at)mitre(dot)org) wrote:
> >The good thing is that there are several companies supporting
> >Postgres,
> >so whatever one of them does it does not affect the market as a whole.
>
> Surely there are also third-party companies that provide "support"
> for MySqueal in some similar sense?

This is, truely, a very interesting question. I'm not 100% sure about
this but I thought that the non-GPL version of MySQL was tied in with
their support contracts. If this is the case (and I could be wrong)
there's no option to go elsewhere for support if you're using the
non-GPL license (required if you don't want to give out your source code
to anything which touches MySQL, or at least that's my understanding of
how they interpret the 'derivative' concept in the GPL).

So, there may be third-party companies which provide support for the
GPL'd version of MySQL, but alot of people use the non-GPL version
because they don't want to be bound by the GPL to release their source
code. I'd be very curious if MySQL has an official say on this..

Of course, they could switch to PostgreSQL as it uses the BSD license...
:)

Thanks,

Stephen