Re: Making metadata storage SQL-driven

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> > My intent is not to cheat Mysql here - I can assure you of that. It 
> > certainly wont decrease their sales and in fact if Gnome used it it 
> > would probably increase both their profile and sales. If it was harmful 
> > in any way to them then I would accept your point. IANAL so yeah there 
> > may be issues here I do not understand.
>
> well, as I said in a previous mail, gnome-db, along with other projects
> (which right now I don't remember, but IIRC PHP was one of them) asked
> MySQL to allow us to use their GPL libs in our LGPL ones when they
> changed the license. I also think, as the other projects' maintainers,
> that this was good for MySQL. We even "menaced" to just drop MySQL
> support entirely, but got no answer at all.
>
> So, it seems they just don't care whether this is good or bad for them,
> they just ignored those projects.

Thats not the case according to these pages:

http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/faq.html
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/foss-exception.html

They openly support all open source even those that are not GPL 
compliant so you should have no legal problems distributing a mysql 
provider with libgda under LGPL (with a few restrictions). They have 
used this exception for PHP too.

If thats still not satisfactory then IPC is a way out of GPL 
entanglements too (the FSF's views on GPL and IPC are speculative 
interpretation only as the GPL license doesn't mention anything at all 
regarding communication over IPC). From what I have read, the 
overwhelming consensus is that GPL does not extend across IPC so Dbus, 
Corba et al are *generally* considered safe to use as workarounds.

Gnome-VFS-Daemon was made GPL because of Samba yet libgnome-vfs remains 
LGPL so Gnome already uses such GPL/IPC workarounds!

>
> So, unfortunately, I wouldn't believe in MySQL realising GNOME using
> their lib that way is going to be good for them :(

Well, tough to them!

I assert (as a layman) that the LGPL client part of DDS, even with the 
more stringent interpretation of the FSF will not violate the GPL at all 
as it will only implement a subset of mysql's API over IPC so Mysql cant 
stop me legally and if what they say in the above pages about 
encouraging OSS to use its products is true then I cant see how they can 
be unhappy with what I intend doing. At the end of the day what im doing 
here is termed "fair use" and many OSS projects have done likewise in 
good faith so I will be on high moral ground too :)

--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/