The GPL really only gets underfoot if you want to ship binary-only packaged software derived from GPL'd code.
No, the GPL means that if you link any non-GPL software to a GPL piece of software then you need to license your non-GPL software so it's not more restrictive than the GPL.
That means that if a liberary, eg. the sapdb client lib is being linked to a non-GPL application then you are in violation of the license if you do not distribute the source for your application to your customers.
This is not what you want, because there is no doubt that the people who wrote the DBMS did not have any moral right to assert ownership over the application that just happened to be linked to the DMBS, that's why the current client lib is licensed under the LGPL that allows any software to be dynamically linked to it.
One thing that I can't really figure out is what happens when you have:
+-------------------------+-----------------------+---------------+ | MySQL/sapdb client lib | ODBC driver manager | Application | | - GPL - | - LGPL - | - non-free - | +-------------------------+-----------------------+---------------+
The non-free application is linked to the driver manager which is linked to the mysql/sapdb client lib.
This happens that the user of the application has defined the DSN that the application uses to be a mysql/sapdb database.
Now the application developer didn't do this linking at all so he is in the clear, the one doing the possibly violating linking is the user himself and if he doesn't go around copying the resulting setup to another site then everything is fine.
The same thing goes for the JDBC client, the linking doesn't happen at compile time and the user can tell the application to link to whatever JDBC driver there is, so the application developer doesn't have anything to do with that.
So if the license is changed to straight GPL then noone needs to do anything differently.
-- Regards Flemming Frandsen - http://dion.swamp.dk PartyTicket.Net co founder & Yet Another Perl Hacker
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