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."
How do you profit from "free"? You start changing! (Score:5, Interesting)
People loved when CDDB offered to identify CD's so when ripping you could not have to type everything in for your music app. Many people donated time to this "project"... but once it was done, suddenly developers started to have to pay Gracenote for the data, and "free" music programs went away for paid-for-somehow models like Windows Media Player, iTunes, and the such.
It seems like bait and switch is a viable business model these days. Start off as a free project taking free help, then turn around and exercise your copyright burning your former free help but having plenty of money for paid help to take their place.
Not the only project to work this way. (Score:5, Interesting)
MySQL caused a bit of a stir where I worked for the same reasons mentioned in the article. It is not always about doing the legwork, as anyone can pretty much take a few hours of research to find out licenses, variants in code and so forth.
What IS the problem however, is the fact that the GPL is a complex legal document and some companies don't want to pay the fees necessary for a small battalion of lawyers to confirm its use on a server platform or within a product. Its polar opposite the BSD license however is far easier for anyone to interpret and has a lot of legal precedence behind it.
The MySQL dual licensing issue reminds me of another project I encountered. iText PDF (http://www.itextpdf.com) is a Java open-source license that was traditionally released under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Oddly enough, just as their tutorials disappeared when the author of the library published a book. To which is used exclusively when asking for help in the forums, they also changed the license to the AGPL.
This seemed to be a way to force companies into buying their dual license. Apparently a lot of people used their product on a back-end servers to generate PDF invoices and so forth. By forcing the license change it meant that their changes to the code would have to be released and the viral nature of the AGPL forced the hands of many formerly legal products.
Fortunately, their MPL licensed version is only a few months older then their new code and oddly works with their Tutorial files they have hidden away in an old archive on Source forge.
Not that myself or my organization was opposed to licensing legally. However when you have a small, no fee, in house product being distributed within your organization and they are looking for 100$ US or more per instance for licensing fees, it rather makes it a hard pill to swallow.
MySQL had the same problem some of their fees seemed to range in the 300$ US per instance depending on the type of licensing involved and overhead of the company you used to get them. Some individuals at our organization recalls getting Oracle licenses for that price!
In a way, are these open source products or are they simply using the moniker as a way to attract people and force them into costly solutions?
Re:If MySQL over-reached with the GPL, tell the FS (Score:1, Interesting)
of course you're correct about the protocol, you cant apply copyright to a set of conventions, just
documents describing them or implementations of those conventions
but i'm curious about your statement about headers. even though headers are commonly believed .h files
to be non-copyrightable, i don't see any particular reason why they shouldn't be, and have
seen plenty of license language in
Re:Not the only project to work this way. (Score:3, Interesting)
In most cases they start out the former and end up the latter.
The problem is that some people expect to be able to live off of their open source projects, or at least feel they are entitled to earn a buck. Feel free to ask for donations, add a couple of ads to your website or even offering an "enterprise version", but having a successful project doesn't mean that people should pay you for it. Those people you are demanding cash from are the same people who made your project a success.
Then again, it is their project. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating their community, nobody can stop them. There are always alternatives.
Stick a fork in it. It's done. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know every little detail of what's happened and frankly I don't care. If people want it to live on and Oracle don't live up to their agreement, and assuming the code is readable, the community can fork it and move on. If that's no longer legally possible, as far as I'm concerned it's not GPL code. Regardless, my guess is that MySQL will decline but that other projects like Postgress will fill the niche for small free databases. As for the effect on the GPL, things cannot be undone. Once a license is challenged or abused in some way the only possible response is to adapt it to take that into account.
I'm MUCH more worried about Java, OpenOffice, VirtualBox. I'm also concerned about zfs and MySQL, but not as much. Roughly in that order.
Re:Not the only project to work this way. (Score:4, Interesting)
I tell people, look for multi-vendor projects. This avoids a lot of this crap. PostgreSQL, Linux, Apache, etc. are all great projects because the authors have cultivated commercial involvement from a variety of companies. The other side are the single-vendor ones like MySQL, SugarCRM, etc. which have dual-license models. They are the companies to avoid.
Re:If MySQL over-reached with the GPL, tell the FS (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is true, and protocols are subject to the GPL, then Linus's understanding of it is flawed and userspace in a Linux based system cannot talk to Linux kernelspace in the trouble-free way he describes. A non-GPLed piece of software cannot talk to a GPLed piece of software via HTTP......... The list goes on. Obviously we know that this does happen and that the concept is bullshit. MySQL merely used it to muddy the waters, confuse people over licensing and get people to pay for licenses when perhaps they didn't really need to. Certainly, the vast majority of software for internal use doesn't require licenses from MySQL. Monty is now off into his own little world railing against that when it was what made his company money and got it sold to Sun for a stupidly overpriced amount, making him some pocket change as well I wouldn't wonder.
Thankfully, the article knows this is silly and not only says so, but blames MySQL for it. This is the way the GPL has always worked in other projects, and was known to work. MySQL simply used it as an avenue for confusion and to get people to cough up, which had the side-effect of people being more afraid of the GPL than they needed to be.
Was that really it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't have time to look this up at the moment, but what I recall as the most important and least conventional GPL interpretation is that MySQL (the company) took the position that applications that depended on MySQL (the RDBMS) as one of their components were derivative works that incorporated the RDBMS--and that details about linking or protocols were just not relevant. Therefore, unless you bought a commercial license from the company, such applications had to be distributed under GPL terms.
Put more carefully, the idea is an application is a derivative of MySQL is whether if it relies critically on MySQL to provide its functionality. So, for example, a blog management tool that absolutely required MySQL as its backend would be a derivative work, while a graphical SQL client that could connect to many different RDBMSes and generically examine and modify the schema might not be (at least not under this criterion).
They may have additionally taken the position that the protocol is subject to the license, or something similar to that, but that would hardly be the whole position they've taken.
Note that the FSF itself takes a similar position with regards to linking to libraries, as shown by this old exchange about CLISP and readline [sourceforge.net]. Quoting from one of RMS's emails there:
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
Re:It's Monty again, having his cake and eating it (Score:3, Interesting)
Brian,
Well, your article sounds identical to the presentation we've been hearing from Monty for some months now, and you are behind the Drizzle fork.
Re:It's Monty again, having his cake and eating it (Score:5, Interesting)
Hi!
My article sounds like something Monty would publish? I don't think so, Monty is a firm believer that the GPL does influence the protocol (aka, you can have a GPL based protocol). If you would bother to read some of the published material around what was said for the benefit of the EU you would know that. Quite a bit of his argument to the EU is based on the belief that the protocol follows GPL.
Drizzle? Monty has nothing to do with Drizzle. He has never committed a line of code, and I doubt he has even looked at it. MariaDB, the databases he works on, is very different. The two are nothing alike other then sharing a common ancestor.
Once again Bruce, read up a bit, and get your facts straight.
Cheers,
-Brian
Switched all my customers to Postgres (Score:3, Interesting)
Postgres.. the REAL free alternative. Mysql licensing has always been hairy at best, and the performance has not been up to enterprise levels.. unless you only do reads. I've switched all my customers to Postgres about 3 years ago, and everybody is happy.. and this whole Oracle/Mysql debate is a non-issue.
When you SELL something.. and then you want to CONTROL it.. it's like being an Indian Giver.. There is nothing that Mysql can do that Postgres can't and there's plenty that Postgres can that Mysql can't. So stop the whining, if you want to pay for Oracle, go for it. If you don't want to pay, sqlite and postgres area available.
The only person Mysql has to blame is itself; ridiculously overreaching licensing made me dump it, and I encourage everybody else to do the same. If you want to donate time to a database, sqlite and postgres.
I know you mysql'ers aren't use to hearing the truth; the sky is not falling but mysql usage is. Live with it.
Re:It's Monty again, having his cake and eating it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Basic economics (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not that the general impact on the consumer is zero, but that the consumer uses us all the time and doesn't realize that we're there. We're in those other software platforms you mentioned, in their SONY TV (literally hundreds of models), and every time they type a domain name into their web browser.
I remember leaving Pixar, and discussing with Steve Jobs that I was going to work full time on Open Source. Steve didn't think we'd ever be able to make a successful GUI. Two years later he went on stage at MacWorld and announced that Safari would be based on KDE, standing in front of a slide entitled "Open Source, We Love It".
We own a big piece of the smartphone market now, which is the platform of tomorrow. The world isn't going back. How much did you expect us to achieve in 10 years.
As far as FSF vs. Open Source, not many people care any longer that RMS and Eric Raymond don't get along. I can't see that it's getting in the way of anything.
We did have a FOSS segment that was oriented toward public service. Ubuntu ate them. Actually, they're still around, they just don't matter much any longer. It's not clear that the public wanted the service.