Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Yet another licensing change in the OSS world, as MySQL changes it’s licensing policy, as originally noted by Sterling Hughes.

Sterling’s main reason for posting this is that MySQL and PHP will no longer be bundled together. This is at once a serious and triival matter. It’s trivial because people can still get their hands on MySQL as well as PHP quite easily. If you can find the one, you are sure to be able to find the other.

It is serious, though, in that it is a rather major shift for one of the major OSS gems.

What the new license says

The basic details of the licensing are as follows:

MySQL is free so long as:

- the software it’s used in is GPL or OSI compliant
- not distributed, copied, etc

Results

While this may sound fine and dandy, there is a bit of a hitch: all applications which use MySQL can now no longer include the RDBMS in the software. This is where the PHP crew seem to have gotten the boot.

That said, I’m sure the MySQL group have their reasons, and I’m sure everything will work out. Likewise I think the redefinition is a good move as it clarifies several things, puts variouses classes of organizations in their places, etc.

Objection

The only thing I, personally, take issue with is this statement:

If you represent a non-profit organisation or an academic institution, we recommend you to put your own application under GPL. Thereby you are free to use MySQL software free of charge under the GPL licence. (We also believe that if you have strong reasons not to go GPL, you also have the monetary means to purchase commercial licences.)

For us at work this presents a conundrum, and is one of the reasons we have never used MySQL, as well as a lot of OSS software. To me, “open” isn’t really “open”. To me, it locks you into an agreement far more than most EULA’s. For us, we are a non-profit charity. We have a large budget, but we do not have a large development budget, as we prefer to allocate that to other resources, more important ones. But, the leadership team is also very possessive. We’ve simply been burned too often by developers keeping, modifying or selling the code.

Ah well, we’re happy with SQL Server, clipper, etc at the moment. Just sad that while the compartmentalization is good in that the grey areas are now defined, we were left on, what I feel is, the wrong side of the line.

And, I’m equally sure all MySQL users will be even happier with some of the new features about to come out. Again, well done for OSS!