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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.