Re: Action items now or after board meeting?

[Sam Ruby]

Danny Angus wrote:
>
>>> With respect to dnsjava and mm.mysql, my understanding is that we
>>> had indeed received such alternate licensing. Perhaps this needs
>>> to be made more clear somewhere.
>>
>> If they issued a separate license for everyone to use, then I see
>> no record of this on their website. If they issues a separate
>> license for the ASF, then I would expect the board to have a copy
>> of this and I would be very concerned about what limitations it
>> might place on users of ASF software.
>
> I can't speak for dnsjava but the mm.mysql position is this..
>
> the old mm.mysql driver is released under LGPL, when we removed this
> driver last time this issue came up Mark Matthews, then
> copyrightholder and licensor, contacted me and told me that as far as
> he was concerned our use of this library was consistent with LGPL
> (there is no compile time dependance on the copyright material, only
> on the JDBC contract) and was in fact the kind of use he'd intended
> to allow by choosing LGPL over GPL.

It is not clear that the license he chose was consistent with his intentions.

> The driver has been moved to MySQL and has become the MySQL
> connector-J, who's licence as distributed publicly is GPL and so we
> can't upgrade. Period.
>
> MySQL have indicated to me that they do intend to provide (or
> consider providing) specific less restrictive licences to certain
> groups, and that jakarta would likely be one, but I haven't heard any
> more, and until then the last release of the mm.mysql under LGPL is
> the only one we can use. If MySQL did contact me regarding a specific
> Apache licence I would, of course, pass this on as even a specific
> licence for Apache may not accord with either the ASFL or
> distribution of the driver by our mirrors. FWIW I believe that I
> summarised this on general@jakarta at the time, but perhaps not.

The net affect of such a license would be that people who receive the software from us would have significantly less restrictions placed on what they could do with it than if they received these same bytes from the original source.

> If it would help I can fw my correspondance with Mark to the board
> for the record.
>
> d.


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