Hi Pat, I thought that was discussed before over and over on this mailinglist. I am surprised that many people have isues with that topic. Basically it boils down to 2 questions.
1) Will you include and ditsribute the source code and the changes (if any) and the GPL license in your product ? If yes, than you DONT need a commercial license. if NO, (in other words you dont want to publish any changes you made to the code) then you need a commercial license. 2) Are you selling the product or a service ? If you are trying to sell the customer the very same MySQL product for $$ that he can download, then you must be good at sales, no questions asked. If you are selling a service (Consulting, Installation and setup etc. than you also dont need a commercial license ( + same as under 1 applies). Summary: You only need the commercial license if you change the code and want to distribute it as closed source. You can however at any time make a support contract or buy a commercial license to show your gratitude for the MySQL guys. That is usually a nice gesture, gets you support and backup when you need it and last but not least makes you feel good (peace of mind ;-). I hope that makes things clearer. Nils Valentin Tokyo / Japan http://www.be-known-online.com > Suppose i distribute MySQL-4.1 with an appliance, > which is a sealed x86 machine running a Linux > distribution made by another entity (ok, it's Red > Hat). I don't write any code that's directly linked to > MySQL, I'm only using the existing php-mysql, etc., > packages already provided by the distribution, plus > some third-party apps that are under GPL and link to > MySQL (applications that access MySQL, not written by > me, but are Open Source GPL projects off SourceForge > and other places - i just bundle them with the > appliance). > Any code that I write personally is PHP and sits on > top of the php-mysql module provided by Red Hat. > > The end-user has no direct visibility to the database, > in fact, the end-user might never know it's MySQL - > all that is visible is the PHP interface, via Apache. > > In this case, what's the license? Is MySQL still free > (under GPL)? > > -- > Pat Ballard > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! > http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ > > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: > http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
