An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 12:12 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: The ongoing MySQL campaign by hingo
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign

It seems to me, upon reading the entire thread between you and jjs, that jjs is asking why the GPL isn't good enough for Open Source MySQL users.

You're answering that it's not good enough for proprietary MySQL users, and you believe that if they're not kept happy, Open Source MySQL will die.

The response is that jjs disagrees about Open Source MySQL depending on the proprietary users, and feels that a relicensing of MySQL to GPLv2 or any later version, rather than the current GPLv2 only would fix the concerns for Open Source MySQL users.

You disagree with this, saying that it needs to be relicensed to something more liberal (e.g. MIT) if Open Source MySQL is to survive under Oracle's ownership, but your reasoning appears to be entirely based around the proprietary MySQL users.

Is that a fair summary of the situation? If not, where am I going wrong?

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An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 13:42 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The problem is really that a GPLed MySQL with the copyrights held by Oracle is bad for Monty, who wants to make a living selling proprietary versions of the MySQL server to paying customers. To do that, obviously he would much rather have a GPLed MySQL with the copyrights held by his own company (like before he sold MySQL AB to Sun) that he can dual-license, or, failing that, a MySQL under a BSD-like license that doesn't force him to publish source code.

The GPL version of MySQL is used by a very large number of people and is unlikely to go away anytime soon, no matter what Sun, Oracle, or the EU do. As far as proprietary users of MySQL are concerned, people who are not interested in hacking on the MySQL server itself can write all the proprietary MySQL-using software they care for by using a non-GPL version of the MySQL client library -- either one they come up with themselves or else one that may be available from Sun under the LGPL under the auspices of OpenOffice.org, as alluded to elsewhere in this discussion.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 19:02 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (6 responses)

It is a good summary.

I would add that the incompatibility with any GPLv3 software is a problem on the open source side directly. It's just another example of how MySQL copyrights and licensing have on purpose been designed such that the owner does have the control and can do bad things if it wants to.

During these months I've heard many proposals on how the issue could be resolved. For instance one person said MySQL should stay GPL but then you could add a lot of exceptions to the GPL to address the same issue (similar to Linux). As long as people would at least understand what the problem is, I don't have a strong opinion on that, I'm an engineer so if you ask me I just pick one of the well known licenses.

And finally it is worth re-iterating that the EU isn't as concerned about the MySQL license as the Open Source community is (in threads like this). Regardless of license they seem to be concerned about the MySQL business and organization itself. This is because they are interested in competition, and software that exists on the internet does not yet mean there is any competition.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 19:46 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

people keep referring to the "Linux exception" to the GPL.

as far as Linus is concerned, it's not an exception, it's just pointing out something that was true anyway. Namely that ff you use published interfaces to something that doesn't make your code a derivative of the code you are interfacing with, and therefor the GPL cannot possibly apply.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 21:29 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

We are talking about:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

I've most often heard to this thing referred as "user space exception". Given that it is outside the license text, I guess you may equally well argue that it is not an exception but a clarification.

The main point in our discussion is that a similar "thing" does not exist in the GPL version of MySQL, so applications running on top of MySQL are not analogous to applications running on Linux.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 21:48 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

that is exactly what I was referring to as well.

Linus and others don't view that as a change to the license, just pointing out something that should have been obvious to begin with. Userspace apps are not a derivative of the kernel.

And as others have pointed out in this thread, you don't need to have a GPL application to connect to a GPL MySQL server, you just need a client library that's LGPL or BSD and then you can have your proprietary code connect to a GPL server. IFF you change the internals of the server, then you need to worry about the GPL, but not if you just access it.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 6, 2010 16:53 UTC (Wed) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Possibly so. The problem is that for the last decade MySQL Ab and then Sun would push the interpretation of the GPL in their favor. So for instance, they might say to a customer that if you ship an application together with MySQL server, and the application is also using MySQL specific SQL, it is a derivative of MySQL. I know, because I was one of them. You may not agree that that is the right way to interpret the GPL, but on the other hand that is not yet a guarantee that Oracle as the new owner of MySQL wouldn't sue such users. Given how MySQL Ab historically has interpreted its own copyright, it would be nice to have clarity on the topic, otherwise people can still be scared away from using MySQL, regardless of what the right interpretation is.

The other thing is that MySQL is used in various ways: as a client server, fully embedded in the application process (libmysqld), and as a framework for proprietary storage engines (which are .so libraries to MySQL server). The question is, do you want to solve the problem for all of those different MySQL customers, or just the client-server scenario.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 6, 2010 5:40 UTC (Wed) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link] (1 responses)

You keep trying to present clear information, but the truth is most people haven't really bothered to study the situation in detail (or read Monty's blog) and have made their conclusions in advance:
* Monty personally got the whole billion from the sale of MySQL. Now he wants more, the greedy bastard!
* He wants to buy MySQL back on the cheap in order to continue to rob the open source movement
* Closed-source software is evil and must die, as well as everybody who profits from it.
* Who needs MySQL anyway?

Perhaps I am very cynical, but I suspect that what bugs most people is the impression they got that Monty personally sold MySQL and received the fat check. Perhaps you guys should publicize more that it wasn't his decision and, as you noted elsewhere, he got only about 5%.

For me the crux of the matter is very simple: Oracle should not be allowed to buy a major competitor to their database. Yes, MySQL is definitely such a competitor, and people who do not see that are kidding themselves (if not literally today, but in a few years). This definitely will decrease competition, and definitely will affect ant GPL-licensed fork of MySQL. (Why kid ourselves, MySQL was so successful, despite being technically inferior to some alternatives, precisely because of its dual-license model).

This has nothing to do with Monty.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 6, 2010 7:57 UTC (Wed) by sitaram (guest, #5959) [Link]

I wasn't going to get into this thread again, but now I have to...

> You keep trying to present clear information, but the truth is most people haven't really bothered to study the situation in detail (or read Monty's blog) and have made their conclusions in advance:

[snip]

> Perhaps I am very cynical, but I suspect that what bugs most people is the impression they got that Monty personally sold MySQL and received the fat check. Perhaps you guys should publicize more that it wasn't his decision and, as you noted elsewhere, he got only about 5%.

What bugs most people is the mis-representation. Even MPAB folk will agree that this is basically about protecting the current users of the proprietary version, and yet Monty keeps saying that the OSS world is affected.

> For me the crux of the matter is very simple: Oracle should not be allowed to buy a major competitor to their database. Yes, MySQL is definitely such a competitor, and people who do not see that are kidding themselves (if not literally today, but in a few years). This definitely will decrease competition, and definitely will affect ant GPL-licensed fork of MySQL. (Why kid ourselves, MySQL was so successful, despite being technically inferior to some alternatives, precisely because of its dual-license model).

"Technically inferior" coupled with "successful" usually means "good marketing/PR". However, in this case, it was also because they used the GPL as a weapon, which is easy when you combine GPL with copyright assignment and a single *commercial* owner (aka, not like ASF, FSF, etc).

Either way, I don't see a need for the open source community to help perpetuate that state of affairs, and I definitely don't see how Oracle can harm the open source version. I still have an open question on that: show me one purely open source project that is currently using MySQL, and cannot switch to something else for *technical* reasons, that would be badly affected by this purchase, and explain how precisely it would be affected.

> This has nothing to do with Monty.

This has *everything* to do with him, sadly, but I'm not in a name-calling mood today. Or at least not to *repeat* what I have already said.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 5, 2010 22:17 UTC (Tue) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link] (1 responses)

Close. I make no comments on the relicensing to GPL2+ or GPL3. GPL2 works for me, but I'd need to analyze the issues there more.

However, I trust (based on Red Hat, IBM, Novell/Suse, Canonical, Mozilla, Xorg, etc) that Open Source does NOT depend on proprietary. Therefore, making the argument that the need to keep a proprietary version of MySQL out there to "save" the GPL version is wrong.

Also, if the Open Source model of development depends on a proprietary version, that's saying Open Source can't work. yet, Monty's current company is supposedly based on total Open Source. Either F/LOSS works and can exist without proprietary, or Red Hat should be going out of business.

Even with that, there is plenty of competition in the DB world - MySQL will live on (GPL guarantees that), and if companies bet on the proprietary version, they took a risk.

However, it does illustrate the dangers of having a single company control a GPL/Open Source project - you don't build the community that can help rescue or fork the project, because (IMO) one entity (the company) has special rights, and people don't like giving someone else rights they don't have.

An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

Posted Jan 6, 2010 16:58 UTC (Wed) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Hi. I'm kind of done with this thread, but I just wanted to say I fully agree with your last paragraph. I was also often critizising that state of affairs when I was inside MySQL/Sun. (Not the dual licensing itself, but lack of strong community, direction to make MySQL ever more closed source, etc...) Monty has a publicly documented history of critizing the same.