[sclug] MariaDB client licence - other than viral-GPL

[Graham Swallow]

As I mentioned yesterday, there is an opportunity for someone
to reimplement libmysqlclient.so, (probably without api change).

The reason, is to allow 'commerical' programs, client use of the DBMS (over
TCP),
without there being any doubt (in the customers mind) that
Oracle will knock on the door, asking for license fees.

Personally, I figure I could use (XDR ASN1 or google-protocolbufs) to a
proxy,
and dedicate the remaining 5 spare months to work on a musical toy
bouncing-ball-over-the-drum-pattern thing (If I had 6 spare months in the
first place).

And just because I think it is shameful that after 15 years of INTENTIONALLY
protecting MySQL revenues with a (DUAL) GPL-only-client, they do not have a
clear policy
to remove that obstacle, and still ask us to petition the european
parliaments
to overrule property law, invoke anti-competitive-rules, and protect their
company,
(claiming to be safe custodians, for the publics benefit), etc, etc, ...
Just because I dont want to, it doesnt mean that some else wouldnt
be happy to actually do that, and make it better.

So if you know a C programmer, who is interested in DB,
see attachment

Graham


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Henrik Ingo <hingo+askmonty.org>
Date: 9 March 2010 07:46
Subject: Re: Fw: MariaDB client licence - other than viral-GPL
To: Graham Swallow <lists+information-cascade.co.uk>
Cc: Kurt von Finck <mneptok+mneptok.com>, Monty Widenius <monty+askmonty.org>,
Colin Charles <byte+bytebot.net>, Ethan O'Rafferty <ethan.opendb+gmail.com>


Hi Graham

Kurt forwarded me your message about non-GPL mysql libraries.

> ... cant understand why the new position,
> is like the old position, which stops me from using MySQL or MariaDB,
> because I want to use from the C-API, which imposes the viral GPL on me.
> Is there a contractual reason why no-one has written a non-GPL client ?

You are not the only one asking these questions. The only reason the MariaDB
client libraries are GPL, is that they are the same client libraries that
come
from MySQL. Of course we cannot just change the license on them.

Nothing prohibits us from writing a separate client library that would be
licensed LGPL or BSD. The only problem is that somebody needs to do it, we
don't have these libraries yet.

The question from us then is, are you willing to help make this happen? For
instance, if you have a budget to use for this kind of project, you sponsor
the development of such a client library (combined with other customers).
Alternatively, are you able to work yourself on writing a LGPL/BSD client
library?

For the C API client library the work that needs to get done is feasible.
There are 3 different non-GPL codebases one could start from and add some
missing functionality. (Old MySQL 3.23 client, PHP-ND MySQL driver and
libdrizzle.) We have tentatively estimated 3-6 man months to complete this
work.

So let us know how you could help with this so we can make it happen.

> I would be very happy if you could simply point me to the page,
> that tells me that -lmysqlclient will not make a claim on my commercial
> program. So clearly, that even my customer will not have any FUD.

Unfortunately, Oracle may still spread FUD on this topic no matter what they
do, as they probably don't want you to support MariaDB/MySQL at all, at
least
not without paying them a lot.

henrik