Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle [LWN.net]

Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle

Posted Dec 21, 2009 8:17 UTC (Mon) by hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to: Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle

Actually, AFAIK, Sun has discussed it with Oracle and Oracle has rejected it.

On the other hand, we shouldn't read too much into it. Majority of Oracle people haven't yet understood what significance it would have anyway (for instance, in conversations they would confuse MySQL commercial licensing (non-GPL) and subscriptions (GPL) and just in general when you can use the GPL version and when not). So if they one day turn around and do LGPL anyway, it can be explained with pure cluelessness.

That, and having seen how Oracle plays this game, they could just out of principle refuse to do any compromises with the EU, then do the same thing anyway later. Just to make it clear they don't negotiate with anyone about these things.

But as I said, assuming rational and informed behavior from Oracle, it would seem they are against LGPL.

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Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle

Posted Dec 21, 2009 12:06 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"Actually, AFAIK, Sun has discussed it with Oracle and Oracle has rejected it."

Reference?

"Majority of Oracle people haven't yet understood what significance it would have anyway (for instance, in conversations they would confuse MySQL commercial licensing (non-GPL) and subscriptions (GPL) and just in general when you can use the GPL version and when not)"

This was a common accusation against MySQL Ab and then later Sun as well. So not specific to Oracle at all.

Some thoughts on MySQL and Oracle

Posted Dec 21, 2009 13:00 UTC (Mon) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Reference?

Those discussions did of course not happen in public. (And no, I don't have first hand information, I could be misled myself.)

This was a common accusation against MySQL Ab and then later Sun as well. So not specific to Oracle at all.

I give you the Sun part, it was a big company and certainly most Sun employees had no clue about MySQL's business model either. But my point was exactly that it may be premature for me to say anything about Oracle's plans with MySQL licensing based on their current actions, since currently they don't even understand the basics of what the current situation is. So I tried to say that from all I can see I don't expect them to go LGPL, but if it happens, then this could explain why they didn't do it much earlier.