Good News! Mysql's new license...

Jedi_Legend

http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5173014.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news

That news article speaks for itself. It looks like Mysql has made PHP and other open source projects an exception to its GPL rule. Apparently, this means that PHP5 will be able to package with the Mysql library bundled, as long as the remaining issue gets resolved (and it seems there is reason to be optimistic that it will). 🙂 It's about time!

😃

piersk

That's excellent news!!

I don't know about anyone else, but the lack of MySQL libraries has definately been one of the things that were persuading me not to try out PHP5

Moonglobe

on windows the librarys are still bundled.. they're just not part of the core any more. you need an extension= statment in php.ini, that's it.

Sxooter

But does it really fix all the problems. It's obvious from the quotes in the article that MySQL believes that if you're writing proprietary software you owe them a license. But this change means I can write software in PHP using the Zend encoder, make it commercial, and still not pay a license to MySQL, since I'm no longer bound by the GPL in this respect. At least that's the gist I got from it.

Since PHP's reason for dumping the MySQL connect libs was a licensing conflict, and since PHP explicitly allows you to create commercial software and not pay them squat, except for the encoder, and since MySQL can't require PHP to relicense PHP (it's part of the PHP license) it would seem that the very thing MySQL wanted to avoid, people using MySQL in commercial applications for free, is likely to happen.

But I use PostgreSQL, so this means nothing to me really personally, just an interesting philosophical question.

Moonglobe

i'll switch to pgsql as soon as the win32 port comes out, or i can play halo on *nix, whichever comes first.

Sxooter

Good news then, it looks like the win32 port is about done, and will make it into 7.5 this summer sometime.

PITR still probably won't make it, but it's getting some work done on it as well.

But back to the MySQL issue. For a long time they made the point that if you wrote a commercial application in PHP and encoded it and charged money for it, you needed a commercial license. With the introduction of this clause, you can use open source tools to create closed source applications and you don't need to pay MySQL anything, as long as you aren't distributing them bundled together.