Re: Oracle buys Innobase

On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 05:01:50PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> Though AFAIK there wouldn't be anything illegal about someone with a
> commercial license of MySQL using the GPL'd version of InnoDB... but of
> course if they did that they'd have GPL'd software again, so no reason
> to pay for the commercial license of MySQL.
>
> This is the first time I can think of where software being GPL'd might
> actually hurt the open-source community.

Well now, that kind of depends on what you define as "hurt". If you
were only ever interested in the GPL version, none of this makes a whit
of difference.

If all you wanted was that your code was shared and that people who
benefitted shared also, then the GPL serves the purpose. Without the
GPL possibly neither InnoDB or MySQL would have been open-source in the
first place. (Maybe, maybe not. I'm not going to argue this point).

OTOH, if your goal is to "share the wealth" and let everyone get good
code for whatever purpose they want, then they would have chosen BSD
licence. This is what PostgreSQL does.

The political goals of the GPL are hardly secret. Some people might
consider this an example of what happens if you rely on proprietary
software models. At least we still have the code *now* (under the GPL).

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.