Re: licensing implications

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On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 22:56 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> Tom Holroyd wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 22:15 -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
> >   
> >> On Thursday 06 March 2008, Don Russell wrote:
> >>     
> >>> IANAL...
> >>>
> >>> If a company has a commercial software product using some proprietary
> >>> database, and they want to switch to using MySQL, does the GPL license
> >>> allow them to continue to sell their product just as they did before, or
> >>> does GPL then mean their entire product has to fall under GPL?
> >>>       
> >> If it links with the MySQL client libraries, then the code so linked must be 
> >> GPL.
> >>     
> >
> > But see this:
> >
> > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-June/268476.html
> >
> > I've used commercial closed-source software that used MySQL ... that
> > company is out of business now so maybe it's bad luck.
> >
> >   
> Some of that document looks decidedly dodgy, and even if correct, one 
> would incur a bad reputation.
> 
> Giving a choice of existing libraries seems okay, and one could even 
> provide mysql binaries and source. Let the client _do_ any linking required.
> 
> I note this:
> [summer@localhost ~]$ rpm -qi mysql-libs-5.0.51a-1.fc9.x86_64 
> php-mysql-5.2.5-6.x86_64 | egrep 'Name|License:'
> Name        : mysql-libs                   Relocations: (not relocatable)
> Size        : 3869853                          License: GPLv2 with 
> exceptions
> Name        : php-mysql                    Relocations: (not relocatable)
> Size        : 203043                           License: PHP
> [summer@localhost ~]$
> 
> I imagine that the GPLv2 is so commercial users _need_ the licence, but 
> I don't know where that puts php-mysql.

php-mysql falls under MySQL's open-source exception clause, referenced
elsewhere in the thread.  In fact, the exception clause was the outcome
of long, involved negotiation to make sure that php-mysql could still be
distributed, even though MySQL was changed from LGPLv2 to GPLv2.

> 
> ultimately, one needs guidance from the copyright holder and one's lawyers.
> 
> 
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Mathematical Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs

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