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)
In reply to: An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles. by hingo
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign

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.

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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.