On Jan 13, 2007, at 3:08 PM, Wade Maxfield wrote:
Many of you may be familiar with the GPL and MySQL. If so, I
apologize,
this message is not for you.
Just a friendly warning about MySQL and RB and your code!
You cannot ship a product built with the MySQL plugin that
RealSoftware
supplies and sell your product as a commercial closed source
product. You
MUST distribute your source code IF you distribute with the MySQL
plugin
compilet into your product. You CANNOT restrict rights to re-use that
source code. You CANNOT prevent someone from reselling your product
or any
derivations.
This is yet another reason to favor PostgreSQL over MySQL. PostgreSQL
is distributed with a BSD license. You could, if you wish, sell
PostgreSQL, without paying anyone a cent. You could modify it and
sell it, too (some folks do), without giving away your modifications.
I have worked quite a lot with both PostgreSQL and MySQL. MySQL has
recently (finally) caught up pretty much with Postgres' features. But
Postgres is, in my experience, *much* more reliable than MySQL. I've
had projects where I was rebuilding tables in a MySQL database about
once per month. I don't think I've *ever* had to rebuild a table in
Postgres.
(There are other problems with MySQL. One of the worst is that it has
a dumb, exhaustive query optimizer; there is only limited ability to
control it spending forever optimizing a complex query, and if you do
stop it spending forever, it will often come up with a really bad
query execution plan. Postgres, OTOH, uses a genetic query optimizer
that usually finds a good execution plan fairly quickly).
The *only* reason to use MySQL (other than: client wants it,
libraries need it, or backward compatibility) is that it offers a
type of table without transactions that is very fast. But in most
applications, you'll wind up needing more features than this basic
table type offers, and wind up converting it to another table type
anyway.
Regards,
Guyren G Howe
Relevant Logic LLC
guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com
REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming
PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting
Technical writing and training
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