I would like to comment on the following mysql.com question
"We have made our product available at zero price under the GNU
General Public Licence (GPL), and we also sell it under a commercial
licence to those who do not wish to be bound by the terms of the GPL."
Out of curiosity, how does the second statement
not violate the GNU GPL? It seems like the GPL
can be bypassed by keeping two identical copies
of the source code, one under the GNU GPL bundled
with the GNU licence file called COPYING, and
another bundled with a proprietary license file.
Since the two source files can be considered as
being updated separately the two licenses can
be kept alive concurrently. This approach which
as I see it is perfactly legal (as long as it
is made clear which is the GPL'd release and
which is the proprietary release on the download
section of the mysqld.com web site) can lead
to forking. In particular, contributions made
to the GPL'd source code cannot be applied to
the proprietary source code unless the contributor
explicitly states that the contribution goes
to both the GPL'd software release and the
proprietary source code simultaneously.
Personally I would consider it ethical that
contributors provide patches to both the
commercial and GPL'd versions of mysql
simultaneously just as mysql developers
have kindly donated their code to the
community by placing it under the GPL.
It is my hope that more cooperation
will take place in the future.
This reminds me of something like
the emacs/xemacs split with the
sole difference of a licensing
issue. Personally, in the near
future there may be three
distributions (which is unfortunate):
(1) the mysql.com proprietary distribution
(2) the mysql.com GPL'd distribution (identical to 1)
(3) the mysql.org GPL'd distribution
mysql.org will not be able to start a proprietary
distribution as it would violate the GPL. The
reason mysql.com can have a proprietary distribution
is that they are the authors, as explained above.
I do not believe that the mysql.org folks have the
experience to improve on mysql otherwise they would
have started "theirsql" from scratch. For this very
reason I would urge mysql.com and mysql.org to come
to some compromise that would avoid the uglyness of
what I deem as unnecessary code forking. Let us not
have two separate code versions of mysql.
Let us all cooperate.
Also, how is mysql.org's funding strategy any better
than mysql.com? The two parties should perhaps merge.
Having two mysql's will simply weaken mysql's
popularity if there is no cooperation among
the two parties.
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