is possible they would sue, but I do not believe that they would win.
Its not like the technology is so impressive and patented. if someone
build the plugin from the protocol rather then from the source the
copyright and licensing to the source would not be able to touch it as
the ONLY protected issue here would be their source code, not the actual
protocol.
If we actually paid like someone suggested $20 to $50, I am pretty sure
that MySQL would possibly find a way to say that we are not meeting
their licensing requirements.
According to the interpretation of the License they currently have, if
you own a commercial license on a server, then you should be OK as long
as you are on a licensed server. However, according with what sales told
Davis, every connecting program must also be license because the plugin
is currently GPL.
What a mess.
Mark Lubratt wrote:
On Jan 20, 2007, at 5:08 AM, Daniel L. Taylor wrote:
I wrongly was under the impression that using RB and REAL's plugin
would not make me deal with MySQL AB's licensing drama, and together
with a simpler installation and maintenance procedure, this was my
argument to use MySQL.
Before the new GPL plugin, that was true, wasn't it? I seem to recall
that the old version of the plugin was independently developed, and
that was the reason it didn't support all features (like the latest
password encryption), but you didn't have to deal with the GPL.
Which brings me to this: if someone reverse engineered the protocol
being sent via TCP/IP and wrote an independent plugin, wouldn't that
also eliminate these headaches?
I believe (I may be wrong) that Marc at Aliacta (pgSQL4RB) looked into
doing something like this. MySQL publishes their backend protocol in
the documentation and I believe Marc was going to implement it i along
the same line as he did with PostgreSQL. I believe MySQL threatened
him with copyright infringement if he did so. I'm not quite sure how
they could do that if they publish/reveal the protocol; but, you might
run into the same issues here.
Mark
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