A bit of history [LWN.net]

A bit of history

Posted Dec 15, 2009 15:55 UTC (Tue) by prl (guest, #44893)
Parent article: Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle

Those with long memories will remember mSQL. It was started by an Australian guy called (Robert?) Hughes. When he realised that his dbms was becoming popular he decided to remove the GPL from future versions, and make his fortune by commercially licensing it.

Bad move. mSQL was out there and GPL'd and with no more than an extra letter in the name, MySQL simply forked away out of his control. Mr Hughes's company wasn't bought by Sun and I don't think many people remember him. Mr Widenius's company was, of course - and the only reason Mr Widenius made his money is because he was able to take over GPL'd code and had the wit not to repeat Hughes's mistake. He's welcome to dual license anything he produces, but I'm sure he knows the true power of the GPL; that's why he wants the EU commission to give him a get of jail free card.

You'll notice that nothing has happened at Hughes Technologies for 2 years at least.

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A bit of history

Posted Dec 15, 2009 16:11 UTC (Tue) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

> Bad move. mSQL was out there and GPL'd and with no more than an extra letter in the name, MySQL simply forked away out of his control. Mr Hughes's company wasn't bought by Sun and I don't think many people remember him. Mr Widenius's company was, of course - and the only reason Mr Widenius made his money is because he was able to take over GPL'd code and had the wit not to repeat Hughes's mistake. He's welcome to dual license anything he produces

If MySQL was forked from GPL code, how could he offer to dual-license the resulting product?

According to everything I've found, your story is not correct: e.g. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/history.html says "However, after some testing, we came to the conclusion that mSQL was not fast enough or flexible enough for our needs."

Is this true?

Posted Dec 15, 2009 16:24 UTC (Tue) by gbutler69 (guest, #54063) [Link]

Something doesn't sound right. There is NO WAY MySQL would be legal to be distributed under a
dual-license if it was a fork of what was originally GPL-Only. Could someone who knows please
clarify. There is definitely something not correct in the parent's history of mSQL vs. MySQL. Was
mSQL originally BSD or somesuch perhaps? Was it originally dual-license with others having equal
copyright ownership and ability to choose their license differently?

A bit of history

Posted Dec 15, 2009 16:56 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

AFAICR, early MySQL versions were mostly compatible with mSQL, but AFAIK not based on it. See the book MySQL and mSQL.