Showing posts with label dual license. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dual license. Show all posts

Thursday, August 20, 2009

What if MySQL dropped the Dual License?

In his blog Does the GPL Matter? In a Word, Yes, Stephen O'Grady makes the significant point that the dual-licensing model has a major drawback:

Sun/MySQL can only include patches and contributions if they fully own the copyright to those changes.

This gives forks like Drizzle, OurDelta, Percona and MariaDB a major advantage over the Sun version: they can include the best patches from all over. And it is clear that the momentum is building.

In a follow-up blog, Stephen asks: "what would the implications be if MySQL, of all projects, were forced to abandon the dual-licensing model it had long championed?"

Thinking about this, there is something that really bothers me:

Let's assume MySQL took on patches without ownership of the copyright, and thereby lost the ability to provide a commercial license to OEM customers.

According to the GPL this would mean that nobody could ever ship a commercial product with MySQL built-in!

To avoid this possibility from being lost to the world forever, surely MySQL would have to abandon the GPL, and maybe change to LGPL or BSD!