Scott,
On Feb 10, 2004, at 2:06 PM, scott.marlowe wrote:
Now, if you don't mind using the ODBC connector, you're scott free. but
you WILL be bound by the GPL, and the GPL (not MySQL's interpretation,
just the GPL in general) being applied to connect libs seriously limits
your ability to distribute code, since you'd have to GPL your own code if
you distributed it outside your own private organization.
So are you saying that if you connect to any GPL database (e.g. gnumed is a GPL database created with Postgresql), you must GPL your code? Even when using something like ODBC as the connection method?
No,
if you "link" to any library that is GPL you have to ship your stuff under GPL as well. You don't have to ship your application at all, you can keep it just for yourself and everything is fine. But as soon as you want to give your stuff to anyone else, and for commercial application vendors this is rather likely, you have to GPL your code when you need GPL libraries, and that now is rather unlikely for commercial vendors.
This is the very reason why many GPL server or development products ship their client connect or runtime libraries under LGPL. You can link against a LGPL lib that connects to a GPL server and sell your stuff closed source. Those GPL projects that do this don't care what you use their product for, they only care what you do in their code. If you do enhancements to their server or tool code to make your stuff work (better), the GPL makes sure they get those enhancements. If you just use it out of the box, do it, be happy and nice to meet you.
Jan
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