[Leaplist] GPL good or bad?

[Phil Barnett]

On Mon, 2009-12-21 at 15:46 -0500, Vernon Singleton wrote:
> This is not easy to understand ...
> http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/10/importance-of-license-model-of-mysql-or.html
> 
> He says, "One can fork a GPL project (i.e. the code), but one can't
> easily duplicate the economic infrastructure around it."
> 
> Ok.  I'm with you ... makes sense right?
> 
> He later says, "Most of the technology partners, where most of the
> innovation in the MySQL space happen nowadays, depend on being able to
> get licenses for MySQL so that they can combine their closed source
> application or closed code (like storage engines) with MySQL."
> 

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but MySQL is the server side of
a Client/Server configuration. The link between them is not the linking
of code and any proprietary code can access the MySQL database engine
without requiring any license.

So what you are hearing about here is about people who want to imbed
portions of MySQL code in their code, not use MySQL as their data
engine. It's quite a distinction and it means we are talking about
the .5% of the users who are coders vs the other 99.9% who use it as a
data server. Actually, it's probably not even that big of a percentage.

Just sayin...


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