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Re: MySQL vs SVN licensing

From: Mark C. Chu-Carroll <mcc_at_watson.ibm.com>
Date: 2002-07-07 16:29:02 CEST

> Hey:
>
> Karl Fogel wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the heads up.
>>
>> We weren't planning to put any MySQL code into Subversion, so we
>> should be okay, but we'll keep this in mind for the future...
>
> What does this mean?
> Do you guys not want what I'm working on? Assuming it can make through
> a code review of course.
> Or do you mean it in the sense that I'm using ODBC so we should be
> fine?

It's a bit funny to me watching this discussion this weekend. Stellation
was released open-source last thursday. By thursday afternoon, we had
our first request/volunteer for adding MySQL support. So we've been having
almost exactly this discussion about whether or not we can support
MySQL due to the fact that MySQL is GPL, and Stellation is CPL, and
the two are incompatible.

We faced this earlier, because our primary support is PostgreSQL, and
the JDBC support is LGPL. Our lawyers thought that that was not a problem,
due to the way that JDBC loads and links DB specific components.

Unfortunately, I think that that's a very specific conclusion, due to
the particular properties of how JDBC works. Can it apply to ODBC
in SubVersion? I don't know. But these legal issues are tricky
enough that a bunch of hackers simply *can't* draw conclusions safely.
It's obnoxious, but the reality of the situation is, *someone* is going
to have to consult a lawyer about this, to make sure that what you want
to do isn't going to get Subversion into legal trouble.

       -Mark

-- 
*** Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  <mcc@watson.ibm.com>
*** IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/synedra/synedra.nsf
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Received on Sun Jul 7 16:29:39 2002

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