[gnome-db] Re: Using MySQL in LGPL library

[Jeremy Zawodny <Jeremy Zawodny com>]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 10:50:43PM +0100, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> Hi
> 
> We have been supporting MySQL in the GNOME-DB project
> (http://www.gnome-db.org) since the beginning almost (1998). GNOME-DB
> provides several liraries, and one of those is a plugin-based generic
> data access library (libgda) which allows access to several DBMS, by
> dlopen'ing the plugins. Each of those plugins provide access to a
> specific RDBMS.
> 
> The library (libgda) is LGPL, so it seems we are not able to have it
> link against the GPL version of MySQL.
> 
> So, we have been thinking about what to do, and so far we only see 3
> possibilities:
> 
> * force libgda to link against the LGPL MySQL libraries, but I suppose
> there won't be any 4.x LGPL libraries, right?
> * have the MySQL plugin communicate with the library via local
> sockets/message queues/whatever so that we don't link to it directly.
> * completely remove support for MySQL, which, for obvious reasons, we'd
> prefer to avoid.
> 
> So far, we have disabled MySQL access in the CVS version until we know
> what to do.

I *thought* that MySQL AB was coming up with some sort of exception
for GPL'd free software but I don't remember if that got resolved.
Perhaps more pressure is needed?

I'll check with a few folks and see if I can turn up something...

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny     |  Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo!
<Jeremy Zawodny com>  |  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/