On 14 Mar, 09:26, jojap...@xxxxxxxxx ("jose javier parra sanchez")
wrote:
> > itself open source, you have to pay to get a license. Pay for GPL software?
>
> You cannot be serious, GPL has no relation with monetary value. The
> GPL is a 'Usage License'. If i write GPL software to my clients,
> should i give it free of charge ?. That's absurd.
Yes, it's nice to see the standard licensing rumours spread around
completely unconstrained by inconvenient things like the facts. Of
course you can charge people for GPL-licensed software, but you have
to promise to let them have the source code at no additional cost. And
the mere existence of your GPL-licensed software doesn't mean that you
are obliged to give random inquirers the source code: it's only if
you've already distributed the software to people that they have the
right to the source.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
As for things like contributor agreements, that has nothing to do with
the licence and whether a product is Free Software or not: it's a
copyright thing; various permissively licensed projects have
contributor agreements, too. Naturally, the MySQL corporate entity
want people to assign copyright to them so that they can then offer
the code under a proprietary licence, but there would be nothing to
stop you from just forking MySQL and offering it as a purely GPL-
licensed product.
And with respect to the MySQL corporate policy on using their product
in proprietary software, I believe that the reason why the client
libraries are GPL-licensed is precisely because nobody bought their
case for insisting that merely using the database system from a
program creates a GPL-licensed derived work consisting of MySQL and
the program. By linking to the client libraries, however, you are
creating a GPL-licensed derived work in a situation that the FSF would
actually go along with. The recent tendency of differentiation between
the "commercial" and "open source" editions would also indicate that
people aren't really believing the MySQL corporate spin, either.
Here's an example of the smoke and mirrors:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?4,31,888#msg-888
In some businesses with a dual-licensing model, I think it can be the
case that some people in sales/marketing/licensing like to make claims
that wouldn't stand up to thorough scrutiny, but where customers
probably aren't going to risk making a fuss if the licensing costs are
relatively low. Really, the MySQL people would have more credibility
if they just charged for support and bug-fixing and/or used something
like the Affero GPLv3 instead of the vanilla GPL, rather than trying
to ride two quite different horses.
Paul
P.S. It's not that I use MySQL, being happy with PostgreSQL, but
people should at least try and understand the licensing issues
involved.
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