Re: Licensing

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, robby(at)planetargon(dot)com (Robby Russell) wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 11:17 -0500, Richard Welty wrote:
>> On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 07:57:06 -0800 Robby Russell <robby(at)planetargon(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> > I don't think that this is completely accurate. For instance, PHP
>> > is licensed under the PHP license, not GPL. So, according to your
>> > statement, you cannot use any of the PHP Pear libraries (which
>> > are typically PHP license) without a license from MySQL?
>>
>> if memory serves, the PHP folks pitched a fit over MySQL licensing
>> changes, and the fine folks at MySQL AB did some tweaks to
>> accomodate them.
>>
>> as far as point 2 goes, MySQL AB only claims you need to buy a
>> commercial license if you plan to distribute your code under a non
>> GPL license, for some rather ill defined notion of "distribute".
>
> Perhaps the bigger problem with their licensing model is that hardly
> anyone completely understands what they can legally do and not do
> with MySQL...

That, of course, is a pretty desirable consequence.

If people are induced to be uncertain about the meaning of the
licensing terms, then that points them naturally to

"If you are unsure, we recommend that you buy our cost effective
commercial licenses. That is the safest solution."

That uncertainty is worth about $300USD per server license per year.
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