I never ever said MySQL's license should be "forcibly" changed

I never ever said MySQL's license should be "forcibly" changed

Posted Aug 14, 2010 4:39 UTC (Sat) by FlorianMueller (subscriber, #32048)
In reply to: Hm. by Wol
Parent article: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android (ars technica)

Actually, PJ and Florian are NOT on the same side.

That's about the only thing we can agree on. PJ has a simple principle: IBM and its strategic allies are always the good guys. Maybe because of this story about Groklaw allegedly having received funding from the OSDL? Anyway, whatever is bad must always be linked to Microsoft, no matter how absurd those theories are. By contrast, I focus on the issues no matter where they are coming from. I take differentiated perspectives on matters. If you read my comments on Oracle vs. Google, you can see that I don't support Google on everything, but against Oracle's patent aggression they should be supported.

The argument (admittedly Monty's argument, but promoted by Florian) that MySQL should be forcibly relicenced to a developer-friendly licence like BSD has pretty much burnt his boats in that arena.

I prefer not to use such strong words, but in this case I have to: that is just a lie. Nothing else but a lie.

You can read right here in this LWN discussion both the explanation provided by Monty Program's former CEO and I also ask you read my own clarification here on LWN that a license change could not have been foisted upon Oracle against their will and was not proposed; instead, I always made it clear how very suboptimal it would have been.

Apart from being a lie, I also think it's unreasonable to even attach so much importance to that. Does PJ advocate software freedom by saying IBM is free to sue the pants off TurboHercules? Did PJ ever comment on IBM's mockery of software freedom in its Bilski brief, in which IBM claimed that software patents liberated programmers and made free and open source software so very popular in order to convince the judges that software patents are a good thing for free software?

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