MySQL and PHP now OK together?

[Tyler larson]

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 14:48, Alan Cox wrote:
> Thats something for the lawyers to discuss not me. I will merely note that
> the apache license has restrictions beyond GPL so merging mod_php with
> apache seems to be problematic. Apache is variant advertising clause BSD
> so its free but differently free (the joys of licensing)

Yes, I see that part. But PHP is already part of our distro. The
question is what to do with MySQL. If something is awry with the PHP
license, we may have to review our decision to include mod_php 4, but
that's not the issue at hand. I don't think there's anything in the
apache license that makes it incompatible with MySQL 4--after all,
MySQL4 is GPL. Am I mistaken? We originally didn't include MySQL 4
because of license incompatibilities between MySQL and PHP, not PHP and
Apache, or even MySQL and Apache.

> Sure. But put the distributor hat on and look at it the other way. MySQL4
> is not a substitute product for MySQL3 to many users. Its an unusable 
> product becauase the license changed. To many such users its very much
> like some of the proprietary "ahah now you pay per copy" type games,
> with the difference they can opt to keep to the old one.

True. I'm not going to argue that MySQL4 cannot replace MySQL3 for use
with proprietary products like Plesk. However, Fedora doesn't distribute
any such proprietary products. The only one that we worried about before
was PHP--but now MySQL has graciously granted us permission to use the
GPLed version of MySQL with PHP.

The vendors of those closed-source software products that currently use
MySQL3 must be (and in general, already are) responsible to assure that
they only use and distribute a legally-compatible version of MySQL. How
they go about doing that is their business (literally). When done right,
those proprietary (but probably outdated) products can even co-exist
with our previously-installed software. 

The advantage of some vendor releasing his product under the GPL is that
they get to use all of the best stuff (like MySQL 4) with it. It would
be illogical for us to continue to use the outdated but Non-GPL version
of MySQL in order to cater to those few developers who use MySQL with
closed-source applications. After all, they generally don't support
Fedora anyway--and those who want to support Fedora can remedy any
licensing incompatibilities by including the older version of MySQL with
their product.

The reason why we didn't use MySQL4 before was that it was incompatible
with PHP4, and we decided that we'd rather have the new PHP than the new
MySQL. Now that's no longer an issue.

In short, I see your point, but I don't think we should have to worry
about it.