I am far from a legal expert on this... but is it all that bad that
NuSphere wishes to sell a derivative work of MySQL? Other than it competes
with MySQL AB's business of selling their own commercial deployments of the
package? And by that I can somewhat see why NuSphere is using the phrase
"unfair business practice."
I'm fairly certain that MySQL is primarily developed on RedHat Linux
servers, is it not? Linux has gotten itself out of the "hackers" domain
into the mainstream due to the commercial investments of companies like
RedHat and Caldera, both of which sell the GPL product at a profit,
including their own enhancements to it. I can walk into Office Depot this
afternoon and purchase RedHat 7.x right off the shelf. It's sitting right
there beside Windows2000. Obviously, agreements are in place to allow
this. Linux has also suffered its pitfalls from being distributed in this
manner. Caldera, Slackware, RedHat and a number of other Linux derivatives
are not fully inter-operable. On the other hand, Linus and his friends
certainly have not suffered from the popularity of his operating system.
MySQL can and will survive as an open-source project. But to compete truly
on the commercial level with companies that have PR teams and sales reps
and advertising budgets (ala Oracle or MicroSoft), commercial investment is
needed... and that's where companies like NuSphere come into play. Or will
MySQL AB be incorporating in the U.S. and offering an IPO?
Of course, the final decision is left to those at MySQL AB. And whatever
that decision, rest assured that I am behind it 100%. I am an avid
supporter and I continually pitch the worth of all your work to colleges
all the time. I simply wish to present the possible positive side of
this situation for consideration.
Michael Widenius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I want to stress that to date, NuSphere has contributed nothing, no
money or source, to the development of the MySQL(tm) server. What
they have done instead is doing a fork of the MySQL distribution and
making a non-open source distribution that clearly violates the GPL
license.
What NuSphere seems to be trying to do is to get people to approve of
their fork, get more people to work on it, and cause confusion among
MySQL users as to where the origin of the MySQL(tm) source and
documentation is. What NuSphere has done indicates that they want to
be regarded as being in the center of MySQL(tm) server development and
use this as a leverage to push their commercial products that are not
open source. The truth is that NuSphere has nothing to do with the
development of the MySQL(tm) server.
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