BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 3, 2010 5:38 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330)
In reply to: BSD license vs. copyright assignment by rahulsundaram
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign

I'm not convinced. After all, the egcs developers successfully forked and then took over gcc development, even though the copyrights were assigned to the FSF the whole time.

It certainly made matters delicate, in that relations had to be maintained with the FSF during a very tense time. But a group of people who didn't own the copyright successfully put out releases that became the dominant branch of development for a couple of years.

For that reason, I'm confident that Oracle can't kill MySQL. It's true that Monty can't make money on non-GPL commercial licensing of the code or a derivative of the code, and maybe that's his angle.

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BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 3, 2010 11:19 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

I am in agreement with you that Oracle can't kill MySQL because of this. My
argument was never that forking is not possible in a project that requires
copyright assignment. It is merely that copyright assignments creates a
privileged position for one entity. In that case of FSF, it allows them to
relicense code to GPLv3 or later. In the case of Sun or Oracle, it allows
them to sell proprietary versions.

Note however there are some fundamental differences betweeen GCC and MySQL.
Applications that are compiled with GCC aren't affected by the GCC license.
Applications that link to MySQL database are.

BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 3, 2010 18:24 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> Applications that link to MySQL database are.

Yeah, it was pretty annoying when MySQL AB changed the license on their client library from LGPL
to GPL...

But if it's really a problem, the fork of MySQL can rewrite the client library from scratch, and that
will be that.