Hi Oded,
Thanks for the intepretation of the GPL i am familiar with it too since our company also contributes to a lot of open source developent (unfortunately not to kannel - yet)
My point was the mysql inteprets the GPL differently from everyone else. Yes we intend to to link the client against a close source product that's why i wrote to them in the first place asking for a license. What i disagree with is their insistence of our buying a server license. We have no plans at all to redistribute mysql. Our product is not limited to a mysql backend anyway.
the bottom line from the mysql company is that if your product requires the buyer to download mysql server you need to buy a commercial license. This is clearly mentioned on their site.
According to that intepretation almost everything that uses mysql becomes a derived work.
Anyway i think we are getting too far off topic so i will stop with this post.
best regards raditha
Oded Arbel wrote:
ביום ראשון 25 ינואר 2004, 12:03, נכתב על ידי Raditha Dissanayake:
The Problem here is that mysql does not intepret GPL in the same way
that the rest of the world does.
I wrote to them asking for a client license and they insist i need to
buy the server license and with it comes the client license. Do i need
to buy a road so that i can drive a car?
That's licensing issue which has no bearing at all on GPL. to use a GPLed product in a GPL compliant code you don't need any special license.
The only reason you'd need a different license then GPL is if you want to use
GPLed code in a product in a manner that does not comply with the GPL, in which case the copyright holder can set any terms he or she likes - and it doesn't have any effect on the GPL. MySQL can decide that in order to get a license you'd need to send them a singing telegram, and that would be perfectly OK - because you want a proprietary license.
If you want to use MySQL under the GPL license all you have to do is make sure that your product complies with the GPL as I've written below. you do not need any additional licenses from MySQL AB. AFAIU Kannel fully complies with the GPL and so can link against MySQL libraries.
If OTOH you want to redistribute Kannel w/o source code (which the Kannel license allows you to do), that also means you'd need to distrbute closed source code that links with MySQL client code. this is specifically disallowed by the GPL which means you'd need a special non-GPL license from
-- Raditha Dissanayake. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.radinks.com/sftp/ | http://www.raditha.com/megaupload Lean and mean Secure FTP applet with | Mega Upload - PHP file uploader Graphical User Inteface. Just 150 KB | with progress bar.
