Mysql 4.x

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 21:27, James Olin Oden wrote:

[snip]

> If you look back through the list, I early sent a reply from RedHat's 
> maintener of the MySQL rpm's.  The basic issue was, if I recall correctly
> (maybe I need to look back through the list (-;) was that it was LGPL,
> and they switched to GPL.

  That's actually not true.  Red Hat first shipped (as far as I can
tell) mysql with Red Hat Linux 7.0.  In that *rpm* package (packaged by
Red Hat), the License tag was specified as GPL/LGPL.  According to the
changelog entry on July 5, 2000 by teg at redhat.com, the license field in
the rpm spec file was corrected.  The license has never been LGPL, it
was Red Hat who had it specified incorrectly.
  MySQL originally had one of those funky free for non-commercial use
license (I don't remember whether modification of the source was
allowed).  MySQL AB released the code as GPL just as Free Software /
Open Source Software was taking off.

>   The result, with my feeble understanding of 
> these matters, is that anyone who creates an app that uses the MySQL
> database would in turn have to GPL there app (or at least, there schema, 
> but with the clients being GPL rather than LGPL probably all).  I can
> certainly see why RedHat would have a problem with that.

  Yes, I can see how that would have been a problem if in fact mysql had
ever been licensed under the LGPL.


> Cheers...james
> 
> P.S. If you look at the change log on the MySQL packages you will
> see mention of the licensing issue also, although the specific
> licenses are not mentioned.

  See above.


  All that said, I think it's mainly been a matter of policy and I would
expect that if the rpms available at mysql.com do indeed follow Red
Hat's guidelines at least to a reasonable degree, then we'd see some
movement to including those rpms instead of building rpms internally at
Red Hat.

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets