On Jan 13, 2007, at 11:12 PM, Daniel L. Taylor wrote:
I agree. A while back I decided that I would do my best to steer
future projects away from MySQL and to another DBMS, even in cases
where the client might be willing to pay the commercial fees.
Something about the GPL movement really rubs me the wrong way. I
can understand restrictions to keep a library open and to insure
that any modifications to the library also become open and shared.
I can even understand requiring a commecial license where said open
library is used in a commercial product.
But to purposely try to legally infect every code base touched by
the library in a vain attempt to push a world view makes me want to
slap someone. Taking it to the next level that mere communications
between a client and a server should "infect" the client via the
interface library, the subtle way that MySQL does, is just wrong.
"Viral" is too kind a word for GPL. Computer viruses are less
threatening than tricky contracts and lawyers.
Maybe we'll get lucky and a widely used military system will be
found to use GPL code, at which point the world's governments will
pass legislation to make GPL illegal and unenforceable. That's how
low my opinion is of it.
To be clear: my beef with MySQL is not at all with the GPL.
There seems to be a good deal of misunderstanding of the GPL
hereabouts lately. The GPL says that it is good when software is
free. As countless projects have demonstrated, when literally
everyone and anyone can contribute to a project, the result can be
great software that anyone can use without cost.
The only cost involved is that if you want to modify the software,
you can't sell the results without also giving those results away.
This seems fair enough to me: you're basing what you're doing on what
a bunch of other people have done, and *they* are giving you *their*
work on that same basis. We all must share, so that we all may
benefit. Fair enough.
I would also point out that It is unfair to criticize MySQL on the
basis of their use of the GPL, because you can *also*, instead, use a
commercial license. IANAL, but it may be that REAL has done a
suitable deal for our use of the plugin, so that we will not fall
under the GPL. This is a good question to ask, though.
IANAL, but I believe you *can* criticize the form of the MySQL
commercial license. For a start, it's very hard to work out under
what circumstances you need to pay them (or at least, this was the
case the last time I tried).
But all of this is moot. My point was: there is a free database, not
bound by the GPL, that is also technically superior to MySQL. So why
use MySQL?
FWIW, I think MySQL continues to get used because it has greater
mind- and market-share. And I think it got to this point for two
reasons: it had a commercial (and reasonably profitable) entity
backing it, and it had a good Windows experience (until the latest
major release, installing Postgres on Windows sucked -- but this has
now been fixed).
None of this is a good reason for *you* to continue using MySQL.
That's all I'm saying.
Regards,
Guyren G Howe
Relevant Logic LLC
guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com
REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming
PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting
Technical writing and training
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