licensing implications

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Sun Mar 9 13:41:17 UTC 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?
>
> Thanks
Does Red Hat ship mysql on RHEL? yes it does.
Can I sell you a CD with my software on it? yes I can, if you want to 
buy it.
Can I include mysql on it? Yes I can, but if I don't have a licence from 
SUN to the contrary, I must include or offer its source code.
Can I include mysql on it? Yes I can, see previous question?
Must my software be GPL-licensed? No, it needn't, provided it's not 
linked with it. Read the GPL, very carefully and very slowly.

Note that I can link my software, commercial or not, with any parts of 
mysqld that are lgpl-licenced.




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