licensing implications

[Don Russell]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> 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.
>

I'm not sure what's meant by "links with MySQL"... do you mean "link" as in
combining object modules to create a single executable? That won't be the
case. I envision a communication link, to a mySQL server, possibly (probably
on the same physical machine as the "application". There would be o need to
change mySQL, other than through any normal configuration parameters...


> 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.
>

No worries... I'm just "testing the waters" to get a feel for what's what...

I appreciate the suggestion...
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