licensing implications

Matthew Saltzman mjs at clemson.edu
Fri Mar 7 13:28:06 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 22:15 -0500, Lamar Owen 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.

Note, however, the MySQL open-source license exception at
http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/foss-exception.html.

> 
> 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.
> 
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Mathematical Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs




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