Is MySQL Planning a Change of Tune?

Iggy writes "After reading the article on 'The MySQL License Question' by Timothy R. Butler at Open for Business I just have to wonder, is this company's wording on the MySQL site indicating the company is backing away from Free Software, specifically, the GPL? Great reading and certainly thought provoking."

Comments

Nothing new here.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've always been able to buy a commercial MySQL license for a commercial app. Personally, I'd be using PostgreSQL for any serious database work in any case (assuming Oracle or other commercial database isn't a requirement) -- it's much closer to what I'd expect from a database than MySQL.

Nothing to be concerned about here, folks. Move along. Move along.

Free software

[Sir Homer]

The article states that this doesn't effect free software at all. Only commerical software that links to MySQL requires a licence, as it always has been.

Re:Brings to mind a question....

[offpath3]

If no one has gotten a copy of it yet, then they can re-license the code however they want and no one would be the wiser.

This is actually an unfortunate misconception about the GPL. By releasing code under the GPL, you are by no means giving up your ownership over the copyright under that code. As the owner of the copyright, you're welcome to do anything you want with it, including licensing it under any other license you see fit, and MySQL does just this. They offer MySQL under two separate licenses, one GPL, one not, and you can pick which one you want to use.

Re:Well...

[SlowMovingTarget]

Well... I did read the article, and it sounded to me that some web page author got overly enthusiastic about when people ought to buy a license for MySQL. Reading anything more into it would seem to be sensationalism to drive people to the clipping (IMHO).

MySQL AB Comments

[martenmickos]

Thanks for all the feedback!

Let me here present the background logic behind our licensing policy and software policy in general.

MySQL AB is probably the world's largest company that has published all its software under the GPL licence. Over the years we have expanded and developed the business that David Axmark and Michael "Monty" Widenius started in the 90's.

Thanks to our business model, we have been able to hire more developers and make more code available under GPL. For instance, last year we acquired a highly advanced clustered database from Ericsson which we made available under GPL for the free and open source software (FOSS) communities in the world. Monty and David continue to be in the driving seat in these issues.

While being fully committed to FOSS and to GPL, we get more and more enterprise customers who want us to provide commercial licences and commercial services. They also want easy guidelines on open source licensing and when to do what.

In our attempt to make open source licensing easy to understand for enterprise customers who know little about the topic, we clearly have stated things that have upset those who know the licensing in detail. My apologies for this.

I hope you will have understanding with this, and that you will appreciate that we listen to you and make changes as we go. For instance, a misfortunate wording regarding "distribution" and more specifically "internal distribution" has now been removed from our licensing pages.

But more feedback is welcome, because open source licensing just is not easy to explain. If you have a better wording than we have come up with, please let us know.

It is interesting to debate licensing issues, and we do want to do it right. At the same time, we continue to experience that most practical situations are for the most part clear. FOSS projects and use of MySQL clearly falls under the GPL, and enterprise customers invariably want a commercial relationship with us. There undoubtedly is some gray zone, but it is not enormous, and we do all we can to sort it out.

I'd say that our FOSS Exception (which admittely took time to author) is a great example of removing gray zones and impossible situations. Some open source licences are by definition incompatible with each other, but with our FOSS Exception we have made sure that MySQL under GPL can live side by side with open source software of other licences.

There is much more to write on the subject, but I will stop for now. Feedback continues to be very much welcome - publicly or directly to me (I am sure you can guess my email address).

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB

P.S. Sometimes I see comments about our VC financing and where that may lead us. Here is some info for the interested reader: We brought in some 13.5 million euros last year in venture funding. As of today, we have barely touched the money. We are growing fast, but we don't want to grow too fast and risk losing the unique culture of our company. Monty and David and the other founders continue to be the biggest owners in the company. And to be on the safe side, we have made sure through a shareholders agreement that all shareholders stay committed to our open source / free software philosophy. I would claim that MySQL AB could serve as an example of how open source and VC funding can work well together. And I hope the world will see a whole armada of successful open source businesses in the next years. The market is in need of disruptive technologies, and this community has them.

Re:MySQL AB Comments

[Hobbex]

The only valid complaint here is that your marketing person claimed that connecting to the database via a socket was a "grey area" in regards to linking. It is not a "grey area", and never has been - doing so makes the client no more of a derivative work then IE is a derivative work off Apache. Claiming otherwise is downright deceitful.

Re:MySQL AB Comments

[martenmickos]

Thx for the comment. We (MySQL AB) are not the judge on this. Therefore we are careful not to make statements that may be oversimplifications, as that may mislead our customers. Our comment on connections was based on the GPL FAQ on FSF.org:

http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggre gation

It says this (boldfacing by me):

"What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged)."

and this:

"By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program."

But, again, lets remember that only a court of law can take an affirmative position on this. FSF and MySQL AB can only provide their best advice and their presentation of their intent.

Please also note that we are very happy when our users use MySQL under the GPL (as /. does!), but we don't see it as our responsibility to provide a detailed legal analysis to every user. We proudly think we have done a fantastic deed in licensing MySQL under the GPL in the first place, and we think it is only fair for us to assume that the free software / open source community needs little help in coming to terms with the GPL.

I hope this sheds some light on our logic. Many people look to us as the foremost authorities on the GPL. But that's not what we are. We are a software development organisation that provides software to the FOSS community and to commercial users, and that provides additional commercial services to the commercial users. We hope we can be a role model for other open source developers who want to stick to their FOSS principles and ALSO build a great and lasting business.

Marten

Re:MySQL AB Comments

[martenmickos]

The client libraries are licensed under GPL.

In addition we have issued a FOSS Exception which states that you are free to mix our client libraries (under GPL) with other FOSS licensed stuff, such as PHP.

Marten

Did anyone ready the article?

[cluge]

It appears that the folks building MySQL are even MORE pro GPL than a rabid /.er! I know it's hard to believe, but unlike the very bad description of the artcle given above (the sky is falling, the sky is falling) the actual text of the article shows that the company is pro GPL. It isn't backing away from the liscence, but tryng to be sure that users of GPL software uphold that very lisence.

Whats interesting is that this affects open source, but not necessarily GPL projects. Asterisk which use a different lisence have removed MySQL libraries because of this conflict.
From their documentation:
"We were recently contacted by MySQL and informed that the MySQL client
libraries are now under GPL license and not LGPL license as before.

Since Asterisk does allow exceptions to GPL, we are removing MySQL support
from standard Asterisk. We will, where appropriate, make it available via
a separate package which will only be usable when Asterisk is used completely
within GPL (i.e. not in conjunction with G.729, OpenH.323, etc). We
apologize for the confusion.

Is this a case of the GPL being a bad thing?

cluge