Hi Kay
Drizzle is available under a GPL license and the bzr history
contains, hopefully signed, commits from non-Sun employees, thus
making it impossible for any current or future owner of Sun to
simply take the code and run. Which is the whole reason for the
existence of the GPL.
I'm sure Sun's lawyers could clarify this, but I wouldn't bother.
Without a doubt management has done all the necessary work before
this project was started.
Actually, BSD licensing of new externally written contributions is
exactly what would allow Sun (or whomever owns Sun) to grab (a copy of
the) the codebase and also sell it under a non-GPL license. After all,
BSD allows them to do so and they do own the GPL licensed bits of the
code. This doesn't take anything away from the community or
contributors, but it does give Sun some extra opportunity (such as,
effectively, dual-licensing just like MySQL has done).
Licensing new contributions under GPL would prevent this as it
wouldn't have full copyright control or permissable licensing (PD,
BSD) to do those things.
What one prefers will likely on their objectives.
I feel strongly that client libraries should be BSD licensed, as this
encourages usage and integration without licensing hassles for any
type of development.
On the server side, right now I think GPL makes the most sense in
terms of having a platform where the community knows exactly what can
and can't be done. Dual licensing has been a PR nightmare for MySQL
(remember it was part of my job!) and a thorne with the community. It
has created uncertainty, mistrust and avoidance.
We don't want that for Drizzle.
Regards,
Arjen.
--
Arjen Lentz, Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Affordable Training and ProActive Support for MySQL & related
technologies
Follow our blog at http://openquery.com/blog/
OurDelta: free enhanced builds for MySQL @ http://ourdelta.org
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