Tom Holroyd wrote:
Some of that document looks decidedly dodgy, and even if correct, one would incur a bad reputation.On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 22:15 -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:On Thursday 06 March 2008, Don Russell wrote:If it links with the MySQL client libraries, then the code so linked must be GPL.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?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.
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.
ultimately, one needs guidance from the copyright holder and one's lawyers.