MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog) [LWN.net]

In what might be seen as a harbinger of license changes to come for MySQL, the MariaDB blog is reporting that the man pages for MySQL 5.5.31 have changed licenses. Formerly covered by the GPLv2, the man pages are now under a more restrictive license, the crux of which seems to be: "You may create a printed copy of this documentation solely for your own personal use. Conversion to other formats is allowed as long as the actual content is not altered or edited in any way. You shall not publish or distribute this documentation in any form or on any media, except if you distribute the documentation in a manner similar to how Oracle disseminates it (that is, electronically for download on a Web site with the software) or on a CD-ROM or similar medium, provided however that the documentation is disseminated together with the software on the same medium. Any other use, such as any dissemination of printed copies or use of this documentation, in whole or in part, in another publication, requires the prior written consent from an authorized representative of Oracle."

[Update: A MySQL bug report indicates that a build system problem led to the relicensing, which will presumably be fixed in the next release.]

to post comments

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:11 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (8 responses)

They're making friends like nobody's business, aren't they?

We could start with MySQL v. MariaDB, Apache OpenOffice (which seems to have a full-time negative publicity generator in Rob Weir), Oracle v. Google regarding Java, and no doubt you folks will have additional examples to add.

IBM isn't known for making dumb moves, but partnering with Oracle on this stuff is one of them.

Bruce

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:44 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] (1 responses)

I personally thought Rob did an outstanding job on ODF standard. One is of course entitled to one's own opinions about his support for OpenOffice, but "we" are Libre and "they" are Open, and I personally don't see the point a large vat of sour grapes. Ymmv.

Let's not go there

Posted Jun 19, 2013 2:21 UTC (Wed) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link]

May I request that people resist the temptation to respond on this tangent? There are already more than enough LWN articles that discuss Rob Weir's approach to posting instead of the actual news item, and the points have already been made. Let's just take Ed_L.'s message as a reminder to be respectful even when we take issue with what someone posts, and leave it at that.

Thanks.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 3:57 UTC (Wed) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (3 responses)

If correct, this means that I can't copy man pages from one server to another. Nor can I install an RPM package for those manpages unless I install it from a webserver that alos has a copy of that version of MySQL itself. Nor, in fact, can someone like CentOS/Red Hat/Debian repackage MySQL or its documentation for distribution since that may involve modification/translation or whatever and cannot stop further distribution thereafter

I can't publish course notes, a tutorial book explaining MySQL or any article for a print magazine that explains how to install, configure MySQL.
In a year or three, I won't be able to find a MySQL administrator unless they've been Oracle trained. Likewise, I won't be able to find a non-Oracle employed technical author to write/review/translate course notes for Oracle courses ...

Congratulations, Oracle. If you own copyright and distribution on all subsequent copies after 5.3.30, then that's fine. You've also influenced me strongly insofar as I can to tell my bosses, my workplace, my colleagues and the technical world to run, not walk away from Oracle to MariaDB / Postgresql / Nosql or indeed any other suitable non-Oracle product and to continue that process for every other dependency on Oracle software.

If my workplace's commodity suppliers/training providers/partners are heavily reliant on MySQL, then I'll advise my bosses that their suppliers will be as equally affected by this as I am given time and to downgrade their forward-looking expectations acccordingly.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 4:11 UTC (Wed) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (2 responses)

Further to the above: MySQL is (TM) Oracle Corporation and use of the trademark requires prior written authorisation. Please disregard the comment from me above in the light of this information since it may, inadvertently, contain use of a trademarked term. ... :)

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 7:08 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

That a name is trademarked doesn't mean you're not allowed to mention it.

A trademark means that you're not allowed to use the name in a context where it could be confusing to consumers, for example if you were to pass off your own SQL database server as »MySQL«. You're certainly free to talk about Oracle's MySQL product itself in spite of any trademarks that might exist on the name.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 20, 2013 1:34 UTC (Thu) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]

I took amacatur's remarks as sarcasm, given Oracle's many battles/fights regarding copyrights and other "intellectual property" - to include the Java battle with Google.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 6:44 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (1 responses)

> and no doubt you folks will have additional examples to add

Hudson/Jenkins.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 13:45 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

OpenSolaris / Illumos

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 4:23 UTC (Wed) by cjcox (guest, #60378) [Link] (3 responses)

This isn't quite as bad as it sounds. While Oracle is free to relicense (or commit corporate suicide), what they can't do is defeat the GPLv2. Simply put, it means that man pages already distributed under GPLv2 continue to be under GPLv2. That's the beauty of the license. It preserves intellectual property. So... now, that Oracle is trying to destroy their property.... well... heck.. does anyone really care now? Let Oracle dig their own grave.

Frankly, I think the grave was dug a long time ago. Oracle is merely shifting in their coffin.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 6:48 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder though, if you have a copy of the GPL'd docs, and Oracle accuse you of copying their (near-)identical non-GPL'd docs, would the burden of proof be on you to show that the parentage of your copy is a GPL'd source, and not their non-Free version? How would you prove such a thing? Do you keep sufficient records to do so?

Further, given that copyright infringement at the personal level is still (as far as I am aware) a civil matter, I think Oracle would only need to meet the "balance of probability"(?) burden of proof, rather than "beyond reasonable doubt", to have a ruling in their favour.

(IANAL)

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 16:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> How would you prove such a thing?

Comparing source code and such things have a very well established protocol in USA. Standards approaches and how much actual code needs to be copied to prove infringement, how to compare obfuscated code, and that sort of thing.

To answer these sorts of questions is why you'd need a lawyer.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 18:28 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

In USA civil law, proof is considered by "preponderance of evidence", meaning that whoever has more evidence on their side is the victor. To prove your version came directly from the GPLed version, I would think you could provide two kinds of evidence:

Direct evidence of the provenance of your version. If you use version control software, you could show where your version started and how each edit entered into it. If it started with the GPLed version and didn't include anything that appeared to come from Oracle's version, it would be very convincing evidence.
Indirect evidence from comparisons. If you did a three-way diff between your version, the GPLed version, and Oracle's version that showed nothing in your version that appeared to have been copied from new material added to Oracle's version since the last GPLed release, that would be very good evidence that you hadn't been copying from them.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 4:32 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (10 responses)

In light of this, the recently reported decision by Red Hat to switch to MariaDB in RHEL 7 makes even more sense. I wonder if they had some foreknowledge of this license change?

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 4:41 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (8 responses)

It isn't just RHEL 7. Fedora, SUSE, Arch etc are all switching from MySQL to MariaDB and this is because of a series of changes in how Oracle has been managing MySQL including more use or a private bug tracker, not releasing tests, not disclosing security issues when providing an update etc.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 7:46 UTC (Wed) by pcarrier (guest, #65446) [Link] (5 responses)

Sadly enough, that sounds a lot like modern Red Hat to me.

Remember the scheduler bug in 2.6.32 around 208 days of uptime? Private Bugzilla, can't see the technical discussion.

Where are the open source test suites used for hardware certification, or regression tests for all bugs fixed within RHEL5, RHEL6, etc. that surely run on their packages?

As to not disclosing security issues when providing updates, given proper security assessments of kernel patches seem rare (to say the least), I hope they don't make too many claims in that field.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:01 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Excusing the current problems with MySQL by pointing at another vendor is hardly going to help.The problem is that MySQL *used* to do things much more openly and they now aren't after the Oracle acquisition and several major distributions are switching over to MariaDB as a drop in alternative. MySQL marketshare is likely to lose heavily as a result of this.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:06 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

> The problem is that MySQL *used* to do things much more openly and they now aren't ...

the same could be said for RedHat

not that I think the behaviour is good in either case

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:17 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe but let's not pretend Oracle and Red Hat has the same approach to managing open source projects however. The latest problem in the MySQL saga is man pages getting relicensed from GPL to a proprietary license. Red Hat has consistently done the opposite for proprietary components it acquired(GFS2, Netscape directory server, Netscape certificate system, Ovirt etc) and recently dropped any copyright licensing agreements on any projects it maintains (with the only exception of Cygwin last I checked).

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 9:05 UTC (Wed) by pcarrier (guest, #65446) [Link] (1 responses)

More often than not, that's true. Back in 2006, not required a login was "the first step to democratizing the content in Red Hat Knowledgebase." ( http://www.redhat.com/magazine/018apr06/features/kbase/ ).
But if you want to read their tutorial on SELinux File Contexts, like many Knowledge Base contents nowadays, you'll need a subscription. ( https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/217203 )

I'm not arguing Oracle and Red Hat have the same policies or contribution to Open Source. But I'd like to point out that some of Oracle's behaviours probably deserve a nuanced perspective, one that keeps an eye at the "top of the class".

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 9:15 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am all for nuanced arguments but Oracle consistently seems to pick the wrong approach to managing several high profile open source projects it has gotten a leadership role over with its acquisition of Sun. I don't think they are evil or something. Just a deep cultural mismatch.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:55 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

The significanse of MariaDB instead of MySQL in RHEL7 is that it will probably also be a component of a future Oracle[tm] Unbreakable[tm] Linux[tm] and hence officially supported by Oracle.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:58 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Well, I wouldn't assume that. Oracle support contract is significantly different from Red Hat I think and they can choose to exclude any component from their support if they wish to.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 12:39 UTC (Wed) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]

Apparently the switch to MariaDB is not a done deal:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-says-no-Ma...

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 4:55 UTC (Wed) by fedtroll (guest, #91489) [Link] (1 responses)

This is applicable to Oracle buying many $FOSS projects. Microsoft has paid millions to buy $FOSS projects and trash them. Google is now buying $FOSS projects and trashing them. Of course, billion dollar corporations can trash Linux 24/7 and they do. Maybe Linux Torvalds will go back to Finland soon? $FOSS is for sale.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jul 31, 2013 3:34 UTC (Wed) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link]

Subtle and nuanced insights. Top shelf LWN material indeed!

Bravo, sir, Bravo!

Emotional reactions can be useful. They can also be detrimental.

Useful be, facts, can :)

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:50 UTC (Wed) by ryeng (guest, #91491) [Link] (12 responses)

This is a bug. The man pages are supposed to be GPLed. http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 11:48 UTC (Wed) by grahame (guest, #5823) [Link] (1 responses)

that is glorious.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 15:46 UTC (Wed) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link]

Obviously Oracle is closely monitoring LWN. They followed the discussion, and as a consequence, declared this as a bug.

There's still hope.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 11:51 UTC (Wed) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (9 responses)

Well, it's certainly indicative of Oracle's public perception that nobody assumed this to be an accident.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 12:15 UTC (Wed) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (8 responses)

Besides, the fact that it even can happen presumably means that internally they already have an already-non-GPL version ("This is indeed a bug, where the build system erroneously and silently started pulling in man pages with the wrong set of copyright headers.").

Why else would they even have versions with the "wrong" copyright?

I'd assume that for now they didn't want this to be out, but they're still internally preparing for such a change.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 12:28 UTC (Wed) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]

It might just be the version of the copyright headers for the non-GPL version. MySQL is also available under proprietary agreements, so it might just be that someone ran the wrong script (which might have existed before Oracle acquired MySQL and its copyrights).

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 12:43 UTC (Wed) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link] (6 responses)

As others have commented: MySQL is also available under a proprietary license so probably the wrong headers ended up in the GPL release, likely due to some error. Sloppy: yes, but it happens.

What irritates me most is that many people seem to be going into paranoia mode immediately, or sending out press releases/blog posts to say how evil Oracle is, instead of verifying with Oracle if it was intentional.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 15:50 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (5 responses)

Why would that irritate you? It's in line with Oracle's behavior in general, and is thus not an unreasonable thing to believe. If Oracle didn't keep justifying our paranoia, then maybe we wouldn't leap to paranoia mode so readily.

I mean, come on! This is the company that's trying to persuade the courts that APIs should, suddenly and against all precedent, be subject to copyright. That alone is near-SCO levels of evil.

And the fact that a script might exist to separately change the copyright on the man page for different versions of the product is such an unusual thing to do (though, I suppose, perfectly reasonable, although I don't quite understand why they need a *separate* script for the man pages), that it's not at all surprising that nobody thought of the possibility, and instead assumed that Oracle was, well, acting like Oracle.

If you don't want people to leap to the conclusion that you're a bunch of evil bastards, stop *being* such a bunch of evil bastards all the time! :)

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 16:41 UTC (Wed) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems MySQL was a right addition to the Oracle family then: when Monty was still there they claimed that the MySQL protocol also fell under the GPL which of course didn't fly, but put a lot of fear into people who then bought a license. Evil. This is pretty well documented, here's a comment from Ted Ts'o from a few years back:

http://krow.livejournal.com/684068.html?thread=2672932#t2...

So, first selling your company, then slamming the new owners for being evil (even though they continue to run it the same way as before), that sounds like keeping, eating, renting out and selling the cake at the same time.

*that* is what irritates me.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 17:30 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (2 responses)

It seems MySQL was a right addition to the Oracle family then

As a fan of PostgreSQL, I'm hardly going to disagree with you. But you didn't say that you found it irritating that Monty was leaping to conclusions. You complained that "many people seem to be going into paranoia mode immediately" (emphasis mine). I think I adequately explained that, and why it's unreasonable to find that irritating.

Monty's behavior, which I have publicly criticized in the past, is irrelevant to the point here, which is that Oracle has given us ample reason to be paranoid.

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 19:24 UTC (Wed) by geek (guest, #45074) [Link]

WOW! all this and nobody's calling them Nazis yet??

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 19, 2013 19:51 UTC (Wed) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link]

Yes, you are right there, my apologies. There are multiple layers of frustration there and I should not have mixed them.

I find it sad that people jumped to false conclusions after reading the original blog post (which has been amended) without verifying with Oracle first. I should have done what those people should have done too: first think, then post :-)

MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

Posted Jun 25, 2013 19:31 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I don't quite understand why they need a *separate* script for the man pages

It seems plausible (though I don't actually know) that this is related to the fact that the MySQL documentation is handled by a completely different team, in a totally different part of Oracle, than MySQL proper. (Mind you, I'm not sure if that team is responsible for the man pages or just the formal manuals, which is quite pathetic of me given that said team has the same boss as I do, yet I've never learned if they maintain this bit or not...)