Re: About GPL and proprietary software

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Marten G Mickos wrote:

> Scott et co.,
>
> Thanks for your comment. Here is my response.
>
> First of all, let's remember that neither I nor MySQL AB (nor any of
> us) is an official authority for interpreting the GPL. Legally,
> affirmative answers can only be given by a competent court. The FSF
> is a natural authority on the GPL and whenever we are in doubt, we
> turn to them for advice. But not being the authority on the topic
> does not reduce our eagerness to discuss this topic!
>
> Robert Treat already pointed out two main points:
> - the GPL kicks in when you DISTRIBUTE
> - the only ones truly suffering from MySQL's licensing policy are the
> ones who try to exploit open source for their own benefit without
> giving anything back to the community

This is generally true, but it also created an issue where PHP, an open
source project, can no longer distribute PHP with mysql connect libraries
freely due to what I like to think of as an "impedence mismatch" of their
licenses. I.e. more free licenses like BSD or PHP are not always
compatible.

In other words, I can create an open source application based on PHP,
MySQL and my own code, and theoretically can't put it all together on the
same disk pre-linked and ready to go, because I can't legally distribute
PHP pre-compiled to handle MySQL without violation one or the other's
license.

The way I've read it on the PHP lists is that now RedHat would be in
violation of the PHP license if they were to ship two essentially free
packages that were precompiled and linked against each other. So, PHP
users suffer in that instance, not just the folks looking for a "free
ride".

I read over the licensing page on mysql.com and it does appear a lot of
the questions I had have been cleared up.

Keep in mind one of my issues before was that the license page basically
said that if I was selling commercial closed source software, I had to
have a commercial license, ignoring such issues as ODBC / JDBC
connectivity via a non-encumbered license et. al.

So what had bothered me was the appearance that MySQL AB were further
restricting my rights to distribute under the GPL.

All that has been pretty much cleaned up now.