On Tue, 2002-09-24 at 23:05, Ken Menzel wrote: > Hi Everyone, > I don't know if it makes a difference to anyone, but mysql client > libraries are no longer LGPL. see > http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Copyright.html. (original licenses can be > found in old source tar files documentation). I think this means, if > you have an application that uses mysql as one of your databases don't > include the library it unless your app is GPL also (or MySQL gives > permission or changes back to LGPL). I guess you could put a link to > the web site so users could download the package. Is that > inconvienient?
Well the GPL client is the 4.0 client. The 3.23 client is still LGPL. As for "you app is GPL also" we do not demand GPL. We will make a addition to the GPL in the client saying that we allow a list of other OSI (see opensource.org) approved OpenSource licenses also. Like the PHP license for example. So the limited GPL vs other OpenSource licenses compatibility should not be a problem. As for a link to the old client it will not work with future releases when we add things like prepared statements, warning system and other things that require protocol updates. But it still available as a part of MySQL 3.23 as said above. > I don't know if this would affect anyone, anyway, but I found it > interesting that the licensing quietly changed and I wondered if > anyone else cared or if this change cleared up some previous confusion > and is a good thing? Most people are not affected by the change since it affects application when they are distributed. But people who has not followed our licensing guidelines before could have to pay us for commercial licenses this time. And that is the meaning of this. We did this change in 4.0 while it was a alpha/early-development release since we did not want to make the change to fast. We did change the website to reflect the new GPL client when we made 4.0 beta a few weeks ago. The change is made to avoid lots of discussions about when the GPL is effective. Basically we follow the same rules as we always have about when we want people to pay us for a commercial license but now we have a better legal ground to base it on. I hope it will save us (especially me since I have become the MySQL licensing guru :-) lots of discussion about who has to pay and who can use the GPL version. And of course this is totally in the line with what the Free Software Foundation and RMS wants since it spreads free software. We can still make exceptions and allow free use if there is a good reason for it (But not for "I like to make money without freeing my code or paying you" like reasons). So the goal is to get money out of the people who distribute non OpenSource application using MySQL. We need the income for the much larger development team we now have. And the cost of running a real company instead of the administrative mess that Monty and I had earlier (And that mess was very very bad for my ease of mind). Basically in the early years of MySQL we spend all out time on the technical stuff and did the absolute minimum to run the commercial/administrative side. And you can not do that forever. Monty and I also have this desire to work less than 15h/day 350+ days a year as we did the first years. So all in all I hope everybody understands this change and supports it! /David MySQL CoFounder PS: I might not be able to answer any followups to this for a long time. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
