At 04:12 PM 2/14/2002 +1100, David K. Trudgett wrote:

>They do, however, try to give the impression that
>commercial license fees must be paid under certain circumstances.
>Since one may license the product under the GPL, this is not actually
>true.

Yes, but you cannot link to it, meaning that if they provide a
subroutine library that communicates with the server and your program
links to that subroutine library, then your program must be released
under GPL.

From the GPL, Section 2 (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html):

"b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole
or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to
be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of
this License.

>They also say that a client application developed to the mySQL public
>interface consitutes a "linked" application within the meaning of the
>GPL. This would actually be a lie if they had openly stated that as a
>fact (they instead indicate that it is their "interpretation" of the
>GPL -- a plainly wrong interpretation, since such API interfaces are
>specifically excluded from the definition of "linking" by the GPL).

The GPL contains no such exclusion. LGPL does. The explanation that
follows the GPL at the URL above includes this paragraph:

"This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program
into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public
License instead of this License."

>So, contrary to their claims, I may develop a client application for
>the mySQL server, distribute my application under whatever license
>I like, and distribute the mySQL server under the GPL.

This is from the GNU website:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL

"If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that
any
program which uses it has to be under the GPL?

"Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library."

In the case of Firebird, linking with the client library would absolutely
be covered by GPL, as would linking with the Classic engine.

I said:

> > The GPL is a restrictive license.

The GPL says: "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions ..."
BSD is a free license. GPL is a copy left license.

>The GPL is a free license, designed to promote freedom. Not everyone
>wants freedom, of course, such as people trying to sell their
>applications according to the normal commercial model.

Sorry. I find it difficult to accept that trying to make a living
in my profession as a software developer makes me an opponent of freedom.

>Use the public API of GPL'd software and don't link it into
>your executables (statically or dynamically) and you're quite safe.

Forgive me. Perhaps I don't understand software any more. How exactly
does one use an API without linking to the code that implements that
API?

>Only by those who would like to benefit from other people's work
>without giving anything back (like Borland's attitude to open source
>InterBase). Borland can only get away with that because of the IPL,
>which is not a free software license according to the FSF definition.

Actually, Borland try very hard not to benefit from other
people's work - notice how difficult it is to contribute to
the project. Over the past decade or so, they spent nearly a
hundred million dollars developing InterBase and gave all that
work to the community. You've got your givers and takers backward.
(I can't believe that I'm arguing in favor of Borland!)

> > So, if you're developing Free Software under the FSF definition, you
> > can use the GNU licensed MySQL. If you want to protect the sources
> > of your program or restrict your customers' ability pass it on to
> > their friends, you need a commercial license.
>
>Not true, as I explained above. It is only true if you want to link
>the mySQL code into your application. Developing a client/server
>application does not fall into this category.

As above, that's only true if you can find someway to call the
server without linking to it or any interface code.

>A GPL'd InterBase/Firebird would make no difference to most developers
>(the client/server developers). It might make a difference to embedded
>application developers who might develop applications that directly
>embed IB/FB code.

That would be true if the client library were still available under
IPL or BSD. Since the client library is a conditional compilation
and link of the server, making that distinction would be difficult.

>Thanks for your thoughts, Ann, but I must say there is a lot of
>misunderstanding and unfounded fear surrounding the GPL,

It's amazing the amount of misunderstanding that can be eliminated
by reading the document.

Regards,

Ann





GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

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Updated: Last modified: Sun Jul 15 13:13:30 CEST 2001