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MySQL Man Pages Silently Relicensed Away From GPL
An anonymous reader writes "The MariaDB blog is reporting a small change to the license covering the man pages to MySQL. Until recently, the governing license was GPLv2. Now the license reads, 'This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.'"
GPL isn't a documentation license. The GPL itself isn't licensed under the GPL.
like oracle but come on Larry no need to be that greedy
Linux modi 2.6.26-2-parisc
They offer things under two licenses: GPL and commercial. IMO, it is far more likely that some build script broke and failed to replace the copyright notice on the GPLed export than that Oracle has decided to try to take the man pages proprietary.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Most distributions include the documentation with any software packages distributed. Without a GPL or free software license on the documentation, the distributions must either:
(a) comply with the license,
(b) provide a third-party download (like Adobe with Flash), or
(c) stop including MySQL.
Given the existence of MariaDB, it might be simplest to stop including MySQL in the distribution.
Dontcha mean FirstPostgre?
Table-ized A.I.
Wouldn't they need the approval of everyone who contributed to the GPL'd version in order to do this?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If a threatening company buys out the main devs for a project. the community can always maintain and actively develop a fork under the GPL or other free software license. It worked for LibreOffice.
Just use Postgres - and get on with whatever it is you have to do :)
I think Oracle has been pretty clear the whole way that they are trying to slowly kill off MySQL and drive users towards their more enterprise grade (read: grossly overpriced) product. They've jacked up the license fees substantially a couple times and pretty much every step of the way signaled that they're not really interested in supporting an open source DB, so I'm actually not even sure why this is newsworthy. I actually find a number of features of Oracle's DB offering fairly interesting, but wholly unnecessary for most web applications, so I expect everyone will move on to MariaDB and PostgreSQL. Nice of Oracle to provide a little window for everyone to switch, not that it was their intention.
Let's look at what Oracle is doing. I'll start the list of moves that appear to be intended to alienate the community around the very software they're promoting and cause the Open Source community to create viable forks that end up absconding with the product and its market. You guys contribute additional examples...
IBM isn't known for dumb moves, but partnering with Oracle on this sure is one.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
This is why you shouldn't work on free software that requires you to hand over your copyright. This includes GNU software as well. Of course the FSF would be ideologically opposed to selling their copyrights to a proprietary software company, but what happens if one day donations dry up and they go bankrupt? Then the purchasers of the assets would be perfectly entitled to relicense your code however they want. Even if a bankrupt FSF tried to sell their assets to free-software-friendly companies, the court would probably block that if a proprietary software company made a higher offer. Furthermore, in some jurisdictions, the bankruptcy trustee, administrator, or court can terminate existing licenses—meaning that users couldn't even use an older version of the software, since they would no longer have a license to do so.
But it is possible for the copyright owner to commit a user trust violation by providing new versions of a work only under much harsher terms.
Seriously, this is just about perfect proof that Oracle isn't even paying attention to the MySQL community. If they were paying even the smallest iota of attention, they would have realized that changing the license terms on *anything* would be a big deal to the users, who are already a bit hesitant. At the very least, they would have messaged it better - told everyone up-front what they were doing, and *why*. Hell, maybe they actually have a good reason.
But now, they've lost spin control on their own action, to their #1 competitor. And the saddest part is, Oracle probably doesn't even care.
Really? Well, it was a good idea for Monty because he had a product worth buying when Sun paid him out.
So, what if you wrote them? Then you had to provide a copyright assignment to MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle and you already gave them control over copy rights.
If Monty wanted to license it as GPL-only, that would have had the same effect. Instead he chose a dual license explicitly so that he could sell the project and make money. It's much harder to sell GPL-only code in this context, you see.
You can't steal my copyright or that of my friends who wrote them.
Ellison can't steal it, but if this comment is to be trusted, you already signed it away.
Perhaps a GGPL, greater GPL, should also be written up as a guarantee that it will never be closed.
That's called donating copyright in a program to a not-for-profit foundation that has the free software paradigm written into its charter. Examples of such foundations include Free Software Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and KDE Free Qt Foundation.
Isn't that simply called a fork?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It doesn't matter how strict the GPL conditions are, they have no effect on the copyright owner, who is not bound by it.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
---> Joke
o
/|\ <- You
/ \
Whoosh!
On a related note, why does Giorgio Tsoukalos have such wild and crazy hair?!
It may be that this license change is just a build oops, or it may be that Oracle is breaking it's agreement with the EU to keep mysql stable, supported and free. In any case, this does strengthen the case for MariaDB for those organizations are still on the fence about switching over.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I was always under the impression that, once licenced under the GPL, any later versions or forks of it would have to be GPL as well?
PostgreSQL
Everyone knows its better and more free. The MySQL lineage needs to die.
or not matter how many times you agreed to forfeit your copyright? dumbass.
Legal speak for a generic copyrite disclaimer which references a general agreement to me. What is the big deal? Sure it could say GPL, but this seems like a lawyer pleasing way to say "go read the related agreement" to me. The agreement can still be GPL but now the files just say you are restricted to the agreement.
GPL restricts use and copyrite is what gives GPL power.
NOTE: I purposely spell it copyrite.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You've been kicking this one back and forth for a decade or more! If you knuckleheads would have used BSD licensed PostgreSQL from the git-go instead of MySQL's crazy now-you-see-me-now-you-don't license you would have freed up so much time and intellectual horsepower that you'd have your fucking flying cars by now.
Slashdot. It's like herding cats, except cats are cleaner.
I already switched to MariaDB, along with Red Hat, Arch Linux, and most everyone else.
Exactly what happened to open office. We got a working fork, that is what everyone is going to use.
MariaDB is plugin-compatible with MySQL, and remains GPL licensed.
And all of its new code (i.e. not MySQL) is owned by the same dick that cashed out on MySQL. It's history repeating, but go ahead and use MariaDB until it's sold and forked again so that Monty--that genius bastard--can double dip, then you can switch to the next fork.
Or switch to the database you should have been using all along. Postgres is still there and just as better than My/MariaDB is it ever was.
Postgres all good and funky, but switch from MySQL to MariaDB = ~ 10 min of admin time (plus some for backups, if not doing them regularly). Switch all running webapps from MySQL to Postgres = from week to month(s) of programmer's time (there are many nifty MySQL-specific tricks that don't translate to Postgres so well). So I think we all know where all of this is going...
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
No point in all these rants. It's indeed just a bug (for now).
(There are plenty of other good reasons to rant at Oracle)
Distributions of GNU/Linux switch to forks over "shitty". It's almost as if Oracle wants to lose name recognition in favor of MariaDB.
It's likely to rise above $10 per month as more web site operators move up from shared web hosting to a VPS that has its own (increasingly scarce) IPv4 address.
The parent post is an outstanding example of mods failing to read more than a handful of words into a post before modding it "+1 Insightful." In fact, the parent post is breathtakingly stupid in its utter failure to even demonstrate an understanding of which organization was responsible for the textual change at hand. To mods active now who are endowed with reading comprehension skills, please mod the parent post down.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Oracle a week ago:
We never intended for a support contract to be required to keep JDK 7 up to date. TZUpdater was made unavailable on March 8 as part of the End of Public Updates for JDK 6, and as soon as we learned that this affected JDK 7 users we initiated the process of making it available for JDK 7 again
Now this "bug."
Oracle is an unnecessary source of anxiety and risk and it doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. Seems like Oracle employees working on open source stuff are in "monitise it" mode by default and the mistakes they make are revealing this.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The GPL relies on copyright law. The open source community can't create its own legal structures, it can use pre-existing legal structures for its own purposes.
There is no concept corresponding to what you are looking for in copyright law.
"Yes, but it wasn't designed for documentation."
...
When has 'documentation` been deemed not a member of the class 'other work`?
"I have no idea what you're saying here."
You're talking gibberish
AccountKiller