I believe (I may be wrong) that Marc at Aliacta (pgSQL4RB) looked into doing something like this. MySQL publishes their backend protocol in the documentation and I believe Marc was going to implement it i along the same line as he did with PostgreSQL. I believe MySQL threatened him with copyright infringement if he did so. I'm not quite sure how they could do that if they publish/reveal the protocol; but, you might run into the same issues here.
Hi Mark,
You're story above is right. It happened about 4 years ago. To implement their protocol in RB, MySQL A.B. wanted me to get a license and an $3,000 support contract and so on. And obviously our customers too. (Back then I already warned Real Software about the implications of the MySQL license.)
Personally I believe that if you invent a communication protocol, you're entitled to consider the protocol itself, not just its implementation in a particular programming language, your intellectual property. And it would be enough of an argument anyway to cause a lot of trouble to whomever would implement it without your blessing, regardless of who would win in the end. As a developer you simply don't want to get entangled in this. It's really not worth it. Especially when you have already created pgSQL4RB for PostgreSQL which is both technically and price[free!]/license-wise waaay superior to MySQL. [More info about pgSQL4RB at the bottom of this message.]
About reverse engineering: In the old days, Compaq started making IBM clones after they had IBM's PCs reverse engineered by a third party company. They didn't reverse engineer it themselves to avoid liability. They just bought 'specifications' from that third party company which happened to be identical to the specifications of IBM's PCs--obviously by total coincidence. Nowadays this kind of joyriding doesn't hold anymore before a court of law, so forget about reverse engineering. And in this case it would basically be just the same as implementing their protocol which is already published anyway, so why would anyone bother to reverse engineer it? ;-)
And now we're there: the fact that MySQL publishes its protocol doesn't mean it no longer is its exclusive property!
On a side note, I bet a case could be made against Real Software for not publishing all of REALbasic Pro's code under GPL, since it comes with their open MySQL plugin and obviously links to it through the debugger. But since they've been warned by me years ago already and now again in this thread, I'm sure the folks at Real Software know what they do.
That's the biggest trouble with MySQL, the lack of clarity of their license. If you talk to two different persons at MySQL A.B. you'll hear two different stories! Even if you'd buy their most expensive license you'd then still feel insecure. The only rational thing to do therefore is to not use MySQL. There are plenty of other commercial solutions out there with clean licenses, and mostly superior ones, some even totally free for ANY use like PostgreSQL. (I'm a PostgreSQL fan, in case you didn't know already. :-)
About pgSQL4RB: pgSQL4RB is a set of native REALbasic classes to connect with PostgreSQL in a way that allows you to use virtually ALL of PostgreSQL's features. It is also much faster and infinitely more reliable than REALbasic Pro's PostgreSQL plugin--which does not give access to all of PostgreSQL's features. Since pgSQL4RB is made in native REALbasic code, it is perfectly cross-platform and keeps on working with newer versions of REALbasic. For instance when Linux support was introduced in RB 5.5, pgSQL4RB worked without rewrite and was the first database solution to work on Linux, even before Real Software delivered their own adapted database plugins. The same happened again for Macintosh universal binaries. pgSQL4RB has 'de facto' always been the first third party database solution for REALbasic to support new RB releases. Plus it comes with a complete manual of 136 pages that has been described by our users as "the best ever." Thoroughly documented and extremely robust and fast, pgSQL4RB is a solution to create industrial strength databases without developer headaches!
I think that should do for today's plugging of pgSQ4RB. ;-) But if you can't get enough go to http://aliacta.com where you can read about pgSQL4RB's other multiple advantages and download it to give it a whirl yourself!
Cheers, Marc _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
