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

Posted Jun 19, 2013 8:50 UTC (Wed) by ryeng (guest, #91491)
Parent article: MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL (MariaDB blog)

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...)