MySQL's Influence On the GPL 183
An anonymous reader writes "Ex-MySQL'er Brian Aker goes into the history of MySQL and the GPL. His point is that MySQL used the GPL in an over-reaching manner; and now that MySQL is gone as an entity, and the campaigns are over, that the GPL may return to an accurate definition."
Re:If MySQL over-reached with the GPL, tell the FS (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the contributor agreement had nothing to do with the over-reaching, that's pretty much irrelevant.
Re:Not the only project to work this way. (Score:5, Insightful)
> What IS the problem however, is the fact that the GPL is a complex legal document
Nonsense. As legal documents go, it's ridiculously simple. The only time the question of it's "complexity" come up is when people want to either bash it or violate it.
Re:FIFY (Score:4, Insightful)
Counter-rant: I usually do it the way the GP does, in that SQL keywords are uppercase, while user-created stuff (columns, table names, etc.) are lowercase. The idea is to naturally draw your eye to certain parts of the statement.
Re:It's Monty again, having his cake and eating it (Score:4, Insightful)
That didn't parse. Do you want me to present you with Monty's recent arguments to the EU? They've been pretty widely publicized. Essentially, he protested that the GPL terms were anti-competitive in this case. But of course he was one of the three people who put those terms in place.
Re:Not the only project to work this way. (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely not what he said. Unless you are claiming that MySQL intended to violate the GPL. IMO they honestly believed in their unconventional interpretation.
Sorry, but you boys can't turn this into the typical internet strawman argument when a database vendor is pointing a legal gun at your head. MySQL had a particular interpretation and the financial means to enforce it, this went beyond the "below your threshold" GPL debating society here. You can't just dismiss a major GPL company as wingnuts. .....
And as a second point, the GPL (v2) is a thing of beautiful simplicity and balance especially down to the letter. IMO the real issue has always been the endless amounts of useless wankery and FUD from those who claim to understand the "true spirit of the GPL", or whatever idea wandered through their brain. And that all starts with the fat hairy guy at the top.
There is not a single letter in the GPLv2 which indicates it covers network communication protocols. That all comes from people who have huffed too many "spirits of the GPL"
Re:Not the only project to work this way. (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, the GPL is fairly complex. It is only simple when you give away all your source code. When you want to keep parts of the product proprietary, then it becomes more complicated. Does this part of your product constitute a derived work? Does that? Do we have to release this or that piece? How many of our tools used to build the system need to be released? Now, there are folks that say you should release everything, there are often business reasons for people to keep parts private, and that has been encouraged by the community. However, where to draw the line can be hard to draw at times and requires a very careful reading of the GPL, in consultation with a good IP lawyer.
All of these questions come up when a company has both IP to protect, and an obligation under the GPL to produce code. To call this ambiguous document simple is laughable.
Warner
Re:It's Monty again, having his cake and eating it (Score:2, Insightful)
Bruce, before claiming something, you should do some basic resources to ensure that you get your facts right.
- Brian Aker doesn't work for me. He is an old friend, nothing more.
- You know Bryan and should know, as all his friends does, that you can't influence what Bryan is saying; He is always speaking his own mind!
- I personally never got any 130M USD; Not even a fraction of this. (Can easily be verified as all tax information is public in Finland)
- I am not doing business with any rights that has been sold. My company, Monty Program Ab, is doing business on developing MariaDB, a branch of MySQL. We are fully entitled to do this under GPL.
- I have never said or claimed that the GPL affects you over the protocol. The GPL in MySQL does however affect your application if it is distributed with the MySQL server and/or require the MySQL server to work.
- The claim on the MySQL web site about the protocol is the brainchild of other people in the MySQL management (not the MySQL founders), people that you know very well.
- It's self evident that you can't go around the GPL license by creating a socket interface around a GPL program/library and use this instead of the original API. If this would be true, then it would be trivial for anyone to circumvent the GPL and it would loose all it's meaning.
Regards,
Monty
Re:It's Monty again, having his cake and eating it (Score:2, Insightful)
Brian, as you should know I never said that GPL affects the protocol. (See my previous answer to Bruce)
What I have told you is that Richard Stallmans opinion is that if you have a client/server application (both GPL) and the protocol is proprietary (ie not public), then if someone creates a new client for the server this client will also be GPL.
However, this was never an argument that I have used with MySQL; My argument has always been that if someone has an application that require MySQL and this application is distributed directly or indirectly with MySQL, then the whole is a derivated work of MySQL and thus affected by the GPL.
As a separate comment, we never had any notable problems in MySQL with getting people to agree to sign a contributor agreement for donating code to us. Talking with other companies, as long as the contributor agreement is sensible (ie, you don't loose any rights yourself), then people don't have a problem signing it. As a reference, see how many people have donated code to FSF!
The reason MySQL stopped getting contributors was that when I stopped working with the contributors (because the internal developers took up all my time), MySQL AB never assigned anyone else to do this and when the potential contributors didn't get any feedback they stopped working on MySQL.
When it comes to Drizzle, you require the code to be under BSD; In practice this is a contributor agreement too.