Kirk Strauser wrote:
At 2003-10-11T15:56:08Z, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:The situation you describe would mean that mysql would be non-free, and thus not part of Debian. The license of mysql 4.0.14 is a mixture of the GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses, with nothing prohibiting commercial use. I see nothing in the license to call for purchase of a special mysql license for this use.I have no strong opinion on the matter; IANAL and don't hang out on -legal. However, this is from MySQL's licensing description at http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing.html: 3. Commercial use for everyone else If your application is not licensed under GPL or compatible OSI license approved by MySQL AB and you intend to distribute MySQL software (be that internally or externally), you must first obtain a commercial license to the MySQL software in question. You may in fact be correct that it is free to use, but MySQL AB's position on the matter seems pretty clear to my untrained eyes.
I just looked at the page and it seems as though they just elaborate on the GPL. Basically, you use MySQL in a GPL app, and you are OK. You use MySQL in a commercial (closed source, proprietary, whatever) app and you need to buy license from them. It makes perfect sense. OTOH, if it were under a LPGL license, you could dsitribute it along with your commercial app as long as you have not changed MySQL (or at least made those changes available). Two examples, readline and glibc. readline is GPL so for an app to somehow link to it it must also be GPL. (Note: There is some debate as to whether this indicates that binary only kernel modules are a violation of the GPL. IANAL, but I think they are. But, as most references to the discussion point out that Linus doesn't care, people don't worry about it too much.) So, to use readline in a closed-source app you would need to convince FSF to relicense the code to you. OTOH, glibc is LGPL. This allows apps like VMWare, Netscape, Adobe Acrobat, and others to easily run on Linux. (Note: I'm not sure if all those apps actually use glibc, but they are just examples). In those cases, there is no need to mess with licensing. If they link to an unmodified glibc, no worries. If they modify glibc, they must make the cnages avialable. Just my $.02 -Roberto
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