On Sat, 2003-06-21 at 18:14, Sascha Schumann wrote: > > I'm putting this message out as a feeler. I'm going to go ahead and > > remove the mysql library from the PHP source tree. This won't affect > > the extension, it simply means we won't be bundling the *library* with > > PHP anymore. This is in a large part due to MySQL's decision to switch > > to using the GPL for their client libraries as well. Linkage will still > > be available, but we can't ship the GPL library, and the MySQL 3.2.23 > > library can't connect to MySQL 4.1 servers, rendering it broken. > > Go ahead. > > There are rumours that MySQL AB does not want to provide a > license exemption.
Absolutely untrue. I am very sure about this since we have made a decision about this issue. And I am the one responsible inside MySQL AB/Inc. I just myself who have not had time to do the legwork. Investment negotiations take a LOT of time since there are a lot of things to now. And I have had the bad fortune to be sick a a couple of times this spring/summer and that has screwed up my timetable significantly. We plan to do a generic exception making our GPL client linkable with all licenses approved by OpenSource.org. And a extra thing for OpenSSL since that does not pass. But this is a thing that makes our lawyers (even if they are GPL trained by now) unsure about how to write in. And a lawyer needs EXACT text. Zak is the one who is now working with our lawyers on a actual text. > The only consequence is that we should > not steer users into their hands through simplified > deployment. I see nothing wrong with our model. We are trying to make money on Free Software but if are free there is never any question that MySQL is also free. And if you are trying to make money with propreietary software we want a share. This has given us a good growth ground so far and we are now close to doubling (we can not handle more) our development team again. And all the results are available under the GPL! This has lead to a lot of interest from the business community that the BSD license model have not got. > Actually, we should warn users of MySQL 3 that they won't be > able to use new versions of MySQL under the same conditions, > and that they should better look at Interbase/PostgreSQL. Well, if they are free we are free. If not I think they can pay us for a license. I see nothing wrong with that. /David PS: If you have questions about this you can email me directly. Just understand that my email load is -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
