> In this discussion, it's important not to lose sight of Chipp > Walters' early comment that MySQL is NOT free for commercial > use. I was always under the impression that it was but when > Chipp raised that with me about 18 months ago and I went to > the MySQL folks to investigate, I found a dismayingly > confusing plethora of license terms and warnings that frankly > scared me away from using the product.
We took a long hard look at real mySQL licensing costs when we came up with our model. Valentina Embedded Server with unlimited connections is very price competitive. Until about two years ago, it seemed like mySQL AB was lawsuit happy -- they were very aggressive about going after folks who shipped commercial products and werent paying mySQL's license fees. I couldn't really bring myself to feel sorry for them because they were riding the tidalwave of the open source movement -- and a lot of people assume that open source necessarily means free. But I think they finally figured out that people really could not figure out their licensing model. Ive sold a lot of different kinds of software (from "value games" to vertical market 3D apps), and server pricing has got the be the hardest to work out. Valentina licensing is fairly complex because we wanted to give our customers as many options as possible. With our VDN memberships, the "five connection" version of Embedded Server is royalty free. The unlimited connection version is quite price competitive with mySQL. Purposefully so :-) Best regards, Lynn Fredricks President Proactive International, LLC - Because it is about who you know.(tm) _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
