Slashdot Mirror
MySQL's Influence On the GPL
An anonymous reader writes "Ex-MySQL'er Brian Aker goes into the history of MySQL and the GPL. His point is that MySQL used the GPL in an over-reaching manner; and now that MySQL is gone as an entity, and the campaigns are over, that the GPL may return to an accurate definition."
The FSF also requires contributor agreements, and I would argue that the practical reason for this is the freedom to choose otherwise incompatible licenses in the future (such as migrating from GPLv2 -- not GPLv2-or-at-your-option-any-later-version -- to GPLv3). One common reason that the FSF says they want contributor agreements is to make it easier for them to pursue enforcement actions, but that should be available if they hold any copy rights in the work. They don't need to own all copy rights, but they require that as a condition of distributing the code anyway.
Setting aside all the arguments over whether it's a good idea to require contributor agreements, given that the FSF requires them, it's really hard for me to see how it constitutes any kind of "over-reach".
People loved when CDDB offered to identify CD's so when ripping you could not have to type everything in for your music app. Many people donated time to this "project"... but once it was done, suddenly developers started to have to pay Gracenote for the data, and "free" music programs went away for paid-for-somehow models like Windows Media Player, iTunes, and the such.
It seems like bait and switch is a viable business model these days. Start off as a free project taking free help, then turn around and exercise your copyright burning your former free help but having plenty of money for paid help to take their place.
I don't think the "overreached" was about the contributor agreements, but rather the MySQL claim that the protocol for talking to the database (sending SQL queries) was GPL. Thus non-GPL software was not allowed to use the database, and you should buy the commercial versions.
MySQL caused a bit of a stir where I worked for the same reasons mentioned in the article. It is not always about doing the legwork, as anyone can pretty much take a few hours of research to find out licenses, variants in code and so forth.
What IS the problem however, is the fact that the GPL is a complex legal document and some companies don't want to pay the fees necessary for a small battalion of lawyers to confirm its use on a server platform or within a product. Its polar opposite the BSD license however is far easier for anyone to interpret and has a lot of legal precedence behind it.
The MySQL dual licensing issue reminds me of another project I encountered. iText PDF (http://www.itextpdf.com) is a Java open-source license that was traditionally released under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Oddly enough, just as their tutorials disappeared when the author of the library published a book. To which is used exclusively when asking for help in the forums, they also changed the license to the AGPL.
This seemed to be a way to force companies into buying their dual license. Apparently a lot of people used their product on a back-end servers to generate PDF invoices and so forth. By forcing the license change it meant that their changes to the code would have to be released and the viral nature of the AGPL forced the hands of many formerly legal products.
Fortunately, their MPL licensed version is only a few months older then their new code and oddly works with their Tutorial files they have hidden away in an old archive on Source forge.
Not that myself or my organization was opposed to licensing legally. However when you have a small, no fee, in house product being distributed within your organization and they are looking for 100$ US or more per instance for licensing fees, it rather makes it a hard pill to swallow.
MySQL had the same problem some of their fees seemed to range in the 300$ US per instance depending on the type of licensing involved and overhead of the company you used to get them. Some individuals at our organization recalls getting Oracle licenses for that price!
In a way, are these open source products or are they simply using the moniker as a way to attract people and force them into costly solutions?
Well the GPL used to be much longer, but was somehow mysteriously truncated.
Me I'm a maker, mostly of axioms.
DELETE FROM comments WHERE title="MySQL sucks";
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You can't copyright a protocol. A protocol is a logical construct. Compare it to something like COM. Microsoft couldn't copyright COM. They could patent it though. They copyrighted MSDN articles about COM, and the COM libraries themselves are copyrighted, but the interface itself is not encumbered by copyrights.
You could however copyright a manual or other "artistic" work describing the protocol, but not the header files required to use the library. Additionally, a protocol could be patented. The MySQL name was trademarked as well. They had their bases covered, but saying the MySQL protocol itself was copyrighted is just blowing hot smoke.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Since the contributor agreement had nothing to do with the over-reaching, that's pretty much irrelevant.
A protocol is a method, process, and system of communication. Here's what United States copyright law has to say on methods, processes, and systems: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." Likewise, the IBM PC BIOS syscall interface is a protocol for applications to communicate with hardware drivers, yet Compaq and Phoenix were able to clone it by having one team of programmers make a description of the protocol (which isn't a derivative work) and having another team implement it.
Vendors selling knock-off print cartridges have been allowed to use code copied outright from legitimate cartridges in order to fulfill a "security protocol" between the cartridge and printer -- a finding which has held up on appeal.
You might also find Groklaw's analysis of whether the set of values found in the SysV UNIX headers (not the comments, but the functional portions) are copyrightable interesting. Hint: they're not; this is because there's no artistic choice in making them what they are -- their form is precisely dictated by their function.
In the same way, the minimal necessary set of similarities between a 3rd-party MySQL driver and the official one compromises the MySQL protocol, and that protocol (as opposed to documentation describing it or code implementing it at an abstract enough level that the implementer has choices to make in the process) is uncopyrightable for the reason given above.
I don't know every little detail of what's happened and frankly I don't care. If people want it to live on and Oracle don't live up to their agreement, and assuming the code is readable, the community can fork it and move on. If that's no longer legally possible, as far as I'm concerned it's not GPL code. Regardless, my guess is that MySQL will decline but that other projects like Postgress will fill the niche for small free databases. As for the effect on the GPL, things cannot be undone. Once a license is challenged or abused in some way the only possible response is to adapt it to take that into account.
I'm MUCH more worried about Java, OpenOffice, VirtualBox. I'm also concerned about zfs and MySQL, but not as much. Roughly in that order.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Brian works for Monty. Monty made something around USD$130M selling MySQL to Sun, who then sold themselves to Oracle. Monty, instead of buying a yacht and taking a vacation, wants to stay in the MySQL business. The problem is that he sold his rights. If someone was "over-reaching" with the GPL at MySQL, Monty was one of the three people behind that. Now, Monty wants to both take back the licensing scheme that made him a very rich man, and keep the money.
Give it up, Monty. Work on something else.
Bruce Perens.
Read the article.
If this is true, and protocols are subject to the GPL, then Linus's understanding of it is flawed and userspace in a Linux based system cannot talk to Linux kernelspace in the trouble-free way he describes. A non-GPLed piece of software cannot talk to a GPLed piece of software via HTTP......... The list goes on. Obviously we know that this does happen and that the concept is bullshit. MySQL merely used it to muddy the waters, confuse people over licensing and get people to pay for licenses when perhaps they didn't really need to. Certainly, the vast majority of software for internal use doesn't require licenses from MySQL. Monty is now off into his own little world railing against that when it was what made his company money and got it sold to Sun for a stupidly overpriced amount, making him some pocket change as well I wouldn't wonder.
Thankfully, the article knows this is silly and not only says so, but blames MySQL for it. This is the way the GPL has always worked in other projects, and was known to work. MySQL simply used it as an avenue for confusion and to get people to cough up, which had the side-effect of people being more afraid of the GPL than they needed to be.
If you want to understand the economics of Open Source, read this. It pokes some pretty big holes in your thesis.
Bruce Perens.
Hi Bruce!
I don't work for Monty :)
I also don't work on MariaDB (and never have).
Please get your facts straight.
Cheers,
-Brian
You can't grep a dead tree.
I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.
Put more carefully, the idea is an application is a derivative of MySQL is whether if it relies critically on MySQL to provide its functionality. So, for example, a blog management tool that absolutely required MySQL as its backend would be a derivative work, while a graphical SQL client that could connect to many different RDBMSes and generically examine and modify the schema might not be (at least not under this criterion).
They may have additionally taken the position that the protocol is subject to the license, or something similar to that, but that would hardly be the whole position they've taken.
Note that the FSF itself takes a similar position with regards to linking to libraries, as shown by this old exchange about CLISP and readline. Quoting from one of RMS's emails there:
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
Are you adequate?
Brian,
Well, your article sounds identical to the presentation we've been hearing from Monty for some months now, and you are behind the Drizzle fork.
Bruce Perens.
I agree with you, but I believe you to be wrong on a technical point. The license applied to the kernel is the GPLv2 with the specific stipulation that the userspace boundary was not considered a derivative work by the author. Otherwise, I believe distributing a binary that linked with the Linux kernel would have been a GPL violation (depending on the weird interpretation about OS/tools libraries "get out of jail free" clause in the GPLv2).
See COPYING from the linux kernel. The absolute top clarifies the copyright owners distinctions.
The thing about the GPL is that it isn't "viral" despite what folks claim. It merely has terms of usage, just like virtually any other software. When found in violation of the terms, the easiest way to comply happens to be to release your source. You could stop using the GPL software and move along. The only person who can take you to court over the GPL is a copyright holder. Your "customers" sure can't. So if Linus says: "I don't consider that a derivative work", in the legal document describing it, he'll have a really hard time telling folks in court: "I think that's a derived work, and they are in violation of my license".
Kirby
Hi!
My article sounds like something Monty would publish? I don't think so, Monty is a firm believer that the GPL does influence the protocol (aka, you can have a GPL based protocol). If you would bother to read some of the published material around what was said for the benefit of the EU you would know that. Quite a bit of his argument to the EU is based on the belief that the protocol follows GPL.
Drizzle? Monty has nothing to do with Drizzle. He has never committed a line of code, and I doubt he has even looked at it. MariaDB, the databases he works on, is very different. The two are nothing alike other then sharing a common ancestor.
Once again Bruce, read up a bit, and get your facts straight.
Cheers,
-Brian
You can't grep a dead tree.
Postgres.. the REAL free alternative. Mysql licensing has always been hairy at best, and the performance has not been up to enterprise levels.. unless you only do reads. I've switched all my customers to Postgres about 3 years ago, and everybody is happy.. and this whole Oracle/Mysql debate is a non-issue.
When you SELL something.. and then you want to CONTROL it.. it's like being an Indian Giver.. There is nothing that Mysql can do that Postgres can't and there's plenty that Postgres can that Mysql can't. So stop the whining, if you want to pay for Oracle, go for it. If you don't want to pay, sqlite and postgres area available.
The only person Mysql has to blame is itself; ridiculously overreaching licensing made me dump it, and I encourage everybody else to do the same. If you want to donate time to a database, sqlite and postgres.
I know you mysql'ers aren't use to hearing the truth; the sky is not falling but mysql usage is. Live with it.
Well, protocols are the subject of patents rather than copyright so I never felt any need to listen to Monty about that particular point. It's more his protesting the GPL's terms now that they are being applied to him rather than by him. And in that regard your presentation sounds really familiar.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Brian, it is the meme of "we must now reform GPL over-reaching" which has risen only because Oracle is now the entity enforcing the GPL on others rather than MySQL. I agree that MySQL used FUD to cause customers to buy, especially before MySQL 5 came out. But the only folks who ever believed that the GPL applied to a protocol were those who didn't know the scope of copyright from that of patent. This was not an issue that anyone who could discuss the situation intelligently with an attorney ever believed, with one exception, and it does not need reform now because it's not for real. The one exception was the MySQL principals themselves. They got the most draconian read from a lawyer at some point, something that wouldn't ever have flown in court, and Monty still believes it today.
Bruce Perens.
That didn't parse. Do you want me to present you with Monty's recent arguments to the EU? They've been pretty widely publicized. Essentially, he protested that the GPL terms were anti-competitive in this case. But of course he was one of the three people who put those terms in place.
Bruce Perens.
...or have I just been whooshed?
No, you have performed the "Reverse Whoosh".
I give you an 8.6
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I second that. I live in Finland which is part of EU. Of course Finnish laws applies only in Finland and not in other EU countries. Here's my translation of our copyright law's opening section. I couldn't find official translation.
This is pretty clear. Protocol specification document is a literary work and it can and will be placed under copyright law and it can be GPLed too. But not the actual protocol since it is not a literary work. Literary work is something concrete like a book or computer program while protocols are abstract by nature.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a single precedent from our supreme court or in any other lower court. This means that no-one has ever tried to copyright protocols and defend them in the court or that someone has tried but the court hasn't even taken it under consideration.
And yes, I'm not a lawyer but I love doing research on legal stuff.
You don't know what you don't know.
It's not that the general impact on the consumer is zero, but that the consumer uses us all the time and doesn't realize that we're there. We're in those other software platforms you mentioned, in their SONY TV (literally hundreds of models), and every time they type a domain name into their web browser.
I remember leaving Pixar, and discussing with Steve Jobs that I was going to work full time on Open Source. Steve didn't think we'd ever be able to make a successful GUI. Two years later he went on stage at MacWorld and announced that Safari would be based on KDE, standing in front of a slide entitled "Open Source, We Love It".
We own a big piece of the smartphone market now, which is the platform of tomorrow. The world isn't going back. How much did you expect us to achieve in 10 years.
As far as FSF vs. Open Source, not many people care any longer that RMS and Eric Raymond don't get along. I can't see that it's getting in the way of anything.
We did have a FOSS segment that was oriented toward public service. Ubuntu ate them. Actually, they're still around, they just don't matter much any longer. It's not clear that the public wanted the service.
Bruce Perens.
Start with patent 4,549,302 on the guard time in the Hayes Modem protocol. That's from 1985. I'm sure there are others. Surely the touch-tones were patented before then. Indeed, there must be telephony ones going back to the 1920's.
Bruce Perens.
Bruce, before claiming something, you should do some basic resources to ensure that you get your facts right.
- Brian Aker doesn't work for me. He is an old friend, nothing more.
- You know Bryan and should know, as all his friends does, that you can't influence what Bryan is saying; He is always speaking his own mind!
- I personally never got any 130M USD; Not even a fraction of this. (Can easily be verified as all tax information is public in Finland)
- I am not doing business with any rights that has been sold. My company, Monty Program Ab, is doing business on developing MariaDB, a branch of MySQL. We are fully entitled to do this under GPL.
- I have never said or claimed that the GPL affects you over the protocol. The GPL in MySQL does however affect your application if it is distributed with the MySQL server and/or require the MySQL server to work.
- The claim on the MySQL web site about the protocol is the brainchild of other people in the MySQL management (not the MySQL founders), people that you know very well.
- It's self evident that you can't go around the GPL license by creating a socket interface around a GPL program/library and use this instead of the original API. If this would be true, then it would be trivial for anyone to circumvent the GPL and it would loose all it's meaning.
Regards,
Monty
Brian, as you should know I never said that GPL affects the protocol. (See my previous answer to Bruce)
What I have told you is that Richard Stallmans opinion is that if you have a client/server application (both GPL) and the protocol is proprietary (ie not public), then if someone creates a new client for the server this client will also be GPL.
However, this was never an argument that I have used with MySQL; My argument has always been that if someone has an application that require MySQL and this application is distributed directly or indirectly with MySQL, then the whole is a derivated work of MySQL and thus affected by the GPL.
As a separate comment, we never had any notable problems in MySQL with getting people to agree to sign a contributor agreement for donating code to us. Talking with other companies, as long as the contributor agreement is sensible (ie, you don't loose any rights yourself), then people don't have a problem signing it. As a reference, see how many people have donated code to FSF!
The reason MySQL stopped getting contributors was that when I stopped working with the contributors (because the internal developers took up all my time), MySQL AB never assigned anyone else to do this and when the potential contributors didn't get any feedback they stopped working on MySQL.
When it comes to Drizzle, you require the code to be under BSD; In practice this is a contributor agreement too.