Novell to Ship MySQL With NetWare 6

An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."

Comments

No choice about the license.

[feinorgh]

Reading the license term for MySQL it seems pretty clear that Novell has no choice in choosing the license model. According to the terms at the MySQL page, MySQL is only GPL if the whole system is open sourced or GPL:ed. N'est ce pas?

Re:No choice about the license.

[WilliamX]

The reasoning is somewhat inaccurate here. The mysql client library is LGPL, making it prefectly ok to link in non-GPL software.

What gets people is that MySQL continues to describe the GPL licensing of MySQL in a false light, and as such creates a confusion among those who are not already knowledgable about the GPL.

As I said in my earlier post, I understand the reason why they are doing it, they want to encourage purchase of commercial support licenses. But in doing so, they are making themselves look ridiculous, and should instead post an accurate explanation of the licensing.

It's my opinion that MySQL AB never really wanted to open source their product, but did so under pressure from the community who regularly used its non-open source licensing as an attack against it. So this is their way of getting open sourced, but still trying to make people feel that they are obligated to purchase licenses that they are not obligated to do under the GPL license.

Look at Netware 6

[FreeLinux]

I were Novell, I'd be more interested in developing a Samba-style SMB server NLM to try to replace NT file and print servers

Netware 6 already has this. I forget their name for it but, it goes under the guise of Any Client or some such. With this feature, Microsoft clients can connect to the Netware 6 servers without the previously required Novell client. The Netware 6 server looks to the client, like a NT server. Netware 6 also supports an NFS like export that allows *nix clients to also connect natively, without the use of Novell client software.

Netware 6 has a lot of really powerful features. What's more, I think that Linuxers would like it because it has a similar feel, even if the commands are different. Hell, it even runs Xwindows with the IceWM.

Re:What IS Novell??

[Magorak]

Novell has been around a long time and will continue to be around a long time regardless of what any Linux/NT/200 people may think.

The company I work for is a pure Novell shop. We run Groupwise for our email, and plenty of other Novell products and we do extremely well. In fact, Novell even powers our web presence. We will be upgrading from Netware 5 to Netware 6 this year.

It IS a real OS. Standalone server sits in my server room and runs all of it's apps very well. It's a hell of a lot more stable than any 2K/NT box and in many ways, just as stable as a Unix box. I won't say better, but I will say it does a good job.

I hate it when people say that Novell is dead and dying. They've been around a long time and they are still around because they always make a decent product and require very little maintenance, unlike the MS OSes out there.

Re:What IS Novell??

[krammit]

Netware in its current incarnation is a top notch server OS. It's got one of, if not the best LDAP implementations available (NDS, eDirectory) that offers integration with all of its products for very easy administration. (Groupwise is an excellent Exchange replacement, minus the constant virus problems). Once its setup, that's it. It does not require constant attention like other server OSes *cough*. It does still load on top of DOS (for reasons I can't understand) but it is in no way a DOS based OS. In fact, it seems to have borrowed quite a bit from Unix in versions 5 and 6.

What you gain: dead easy file/print administration, extensible LDAP framework built right in, excellent reliablity/stability, can be easily (if you read the documentation) performance tuned

What you lose: application support and expensive licensing.

For small to mid size businesses, you could do better with a WinNT or *nix solution, but for large enterprises with massively distributed networks, Netware is an excellent way to go.