On Monday 06 March 2006 13:15, Andreas Berger wrote: > A few years back I went to a trade show where I met a representative of > MySQL. Since MySQL is not free for comercial applications I asked him if > I could use Delphi (at the time) that supports MySQL to write an app > that uses MySQL and distribute it. He answered: "only if you supply the > souce to the app as well". I then asked if I could distribute the app > and let the client download and install MySQL seperatly. He said no > since the component used by Delphi was GPL and therefore forced me to > distribute my sourcecode anyway. > > My question: does anyone know how this issue stands with Lazarus? Same rules, lazarus is lgpl but the mysql libraries it uses are GPL´d - you don´t need anything from the lazarus guys to create a closed source mysql based app - but you are linking against a GPL´d library - and that requires the permission of the copyright holder - e.g. mysql inc.
So to put it another way, the catch is with libmysqlclient.so which is gpl´d and that means any app linked against it MUST be gpl´d as well, you need a commercial license from mysql if you want to write a non-gpl´d program using it. The lazarus mysql components are NOT affected since they do not link against the library - they merely translate the function names and then use an external call to implement them - your program which uses that unit/components however DOES get linked against it. Only question is whether this means the lazarus IDE gets linked against libmysqlclient when the mysql support for the IDE is compiled. Even then at worst we may have to say the IDE is gpld and the LCL is lgpld - it can´t have any wider impact than that and I don´t see how that can affect anything, after all nobody is building a proprietory derivative of the IDE - we are building apps with the LCL. Ciao A.J. -- "80% Of a hardware engineer's job is application of the uncertainty principle. 80% of a software engineer's job is pretending this isn't so." A.J. Venter Chief Software Architect OpenLab International http://www.getopenlab.com | +27 82 726 5103 (South Africa) http://www.silentcoder.co.za | +55 118 162 2079 (Brazil) _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
