Re: licensing implications

[Tom Holroyd <tomh kurage nimh nih gov>]

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.

> Or, you could use the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL instead and not have licensing 
> issues.
> 
> But I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
> 
> -- 
> Lamar Owen
> www.pari.edu
> 

Dr. Tom
--
Your danger is not small, you free spirit and wanderer! You have had a
bad day: see that a still worse evening does not overtake you! Thus
spoke Zarathustra.