GPL infrastructure software
GPL infrastructure software
Posted Jan 4, 2010 9:00 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: GPL infrastructure software by hingo
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign
If you are a third-party software vendor whose product supports MySQL, chances are that you don't actually need to futz around inside the MySQL database server in order to make your product work with it. Instead, you talk to the server over the network (via TCP or a Unix-domain socket).
Hence all that keeps you from releasing your own software under a proprietary license is the fact that the MySQL client library, which is the bit that does get linked into your product, is licensed under the GPL and would force you to release your code under the GPL (or one of a bunch of other free-software licenses). Come up with your own compatible clean-room replacement to libmysqlclient, and you're home free -- you can still distribute (and support) the unmodified MySQL server under the GPL, and use whatever license you fancy for your own code.
I haven't looked at libmysqlclient recently, but whatever it does is unlikely to be rocket science. The GPL version of MySQL will be available essentially forever, no matter what Oracle may do to the »enterprise« version, so whoever is using the MySQL database server as a client in a »proprietary« fashion today is basically a small push away from being able to continue using it for as long as they like. I don't see a big problem here.
I agree with various others in this thread in that it appears to me that Monty dreams of the EU giving MySQL back to him (preferably for free), after he sold it to Sun to $$$ some time ago. Monty's main problem is that, unlike most other »proprietary« users of MySQL, his business is about futzing around inside the MySQL server (where most others just talk to it via the client library), so if Oracle doesn't let go of the code and he is restricted to using the GPL version of MySQL, he will have to make his improvements to the server available under the GPL, too. Which of course is a bit of a downer. Thus, the big smoke screen.