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Re: [school-discuss] Metadot and MIT



On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Michael Dean wrote:

> ez publisher!  With regard to mysql, to distribute it within your 
> organization, such as on several servers, requires a commercial 
> license. 

I don't see this. According to the MySQL FAQ:
   With  the  GPL  license,  MySQL is available free of charge. Users may
   download  the  software  for free and modify, integrate and distribute
   it.  However,  GPL  users  must  abide  by the rules of the GPL, which
   stipulate  that  if  a  MySQL-based  application is redistributed, the
   complete  source  code  for  this  application  must  also be open and
   available for redistribution.

It's standard GPL. Within an organization you can do whatever you want. 
It's only distribution outside the organization that requires GPL 
source code availability, and even there MySQL is excepting many FOSS 
licenses.

The Apache license is certainly friendlier to those who might wish to 
incorporate the code in a commercial product. 

You may well prefer Postgresql for other reasons but in this application I 
don't see a problem with MySQL's GPL licensing.

Parenthetically, as a strong proponent of open systems/standards (as 
well as open source) I find it quite disappointing that switching DBMS's 
is not a simple component swap.

> Postgresql is Apache licensing.  Many CMS or CRM packages can 
> now use postgresql but not mysql.  There are several comparison studies 
> on the web which document the differences.  In fact, at the last 
> Linuxwolrd, mysql sought the assistance of postgresql in improving.  
> Mysql is better at marketing.  My comparison was taken from cmsmatrix.org. 

-- 
Robert G. Rittenhouse      * Computer Science Dept,
McMurry University         * rob@cs1.mcm.edu
Abilene TX 79697-0968      * http://cs1.mcm.edu/~rob/