The Old Ask Joel Forum - MySQL licensing

MySQL licensing

Is the change in licensing noted here:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/01/16/03OPstrategic_1.html
a slap in the face of open source?

Thanks,
Eddie

Eddie Dickey
Saturday, February 21, 2004

Heck if I know. I don't even understand it.

If it was previously released under LGPL, why can't someone take the last LGPL version, fork it, and make it available under LGPL again forever?

Joel Spolsky
Fog Creek Software
Saturday, February 21, 2004

Well, it's like KDE people that have a project to port the GPL'ed X11 version of Qt back to Windows so that free software using Qt can be ported to Windows without requiring a commercial version of Qt. I think same could be done here.

Sorry for not remembering the project's name nor url.

Teemu Voipio
Saturday, February 21, 2004

MySQL AB has openly stated that they consider their business to be the same as e.g. Microsoft's: selling software. The difference, according to them, is that they believe they can save more on development costs by using an OSS development model so they do not have to pay inhouse for all the development, than they could hope to earn from selling to the GPL crowd.
In order to bootstrap they needed LGPL, but I guess they now feel confident enough on volume that they can staret milking the cows.
As they say: you make money, we want our share.
Why do people keep on believing that they are going to get stuff "for free"? Bubbles eventually pop, get used to it.

Just me (Sir to you)
Monday, February 23, 2004