Kenneth Burgener wrote:
Oh, I thought it was a dual license that didn't include GPL. So if
worse comes to worse, MySQL can be forked, away from Oracle, under GPL
abilities?
Kenneth
Maybe an explanation of licensing is in order here. It's a very
confusing topic. The original purpose of copyright is exactly as it
seems it should be a set of laws used to determine who has a right to
make copies of something. Now in today's digital age that's a lot more
confusing because everything is a copy. In order to play a song that is
stored on my hard drive, a copy is loaded into RAM, and then copied to
various levels of cache, and then to the cpu, this process makes a lot
of "copies". A simpler example is that when I install software to my
hard drive, I'm making a copy.
At some point software companies started explicitly granting
specific rights when someone "bought" a copy of their software.
Sometimes they were expanding rights beyond what was normally had(you
can make copies to install, use and backup the product) and sometimes
the licensing took away rights(you can't use this product to make a web
page that says bad things about us). Some licenses say that the owners
of the copyright can revoke your license for various reasons. For
example the GPL states (iirc) that if you try to deny the rights of
others to distribute the software, than you lose(at least some of) your
licensing rights.
Unless a company has specifically granted itself rights to revoke your
license at any time with out cause, than they can't revoke it with out
reason. So it doesn't matter who currently owns the copyright to a
specific software application, if the previous owner has given you a
license to use the software. The new owner can not just revoke the
license, unless the license says so. So what ever license the current
version of MySQL is under it will always been under. Any one can take
the code and maintain it under that license.
Oracle has one special right that no one else has. They can take the
current code and use it how ever they want and redistribute under any
license they want. So they can add code improvements and sell it and
not share those with any one else, and this would lead to the forking
you are asking about. This is assuming Oracle has the copyright to all
of the MySQL code which they may not. Certain Linux drivers are
copyrighted by individuals other than Linus.
One last thing that was mentioned by some one else. There three
"types" of intellectual property laws. They are very distinct from each
other. If you are going to court over a copyright claim you do not get
a patent lawyer. They are separate issues. The third type of
intellectual property law is trademark. You don't copyright the name of
a product you trademark it. So Linux is a trademark, MySQL is a
trademark. UNIX is a trademark. I'm not sure if Oracle actually owns
the MySQL trademark or not. If they do. They get to decide who uses
that name, so you may be using the "MySQL" code but you'll have to call
it something completely different.
I don't have any idea what Oracle is going to do. I'm just using this
situation as an example to help explain some things that many people
find confusing.
Kyle
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