David Boreham <david_list@boreham.org> writes:
> In addition to the license a product is currently available under,
> you need to also consider who owns its copyright; who owns
> its test suite (which may not be open source at all); who
> employs all the people who understand the code and who owns
> the trademarks that identify the product.
Indeed. One thing that's particularly worth noting is that the mysql
documentation is not, and never has been, freely redistributable.
The *real* license risk for mysql in the past was that all the people
who were qualified to do serious development worked for the same
company. If that company chose to stop releasing updates for free ---
as they absolutely had the legal right to do --- the fact that you had
the source code for previous releases wasn't really going to do you a
whole lot of good. (Now it's possible that users could band together
to start their own fork from the last GPL release, and eventually get to
the point of doing useful development. We've seen that movie before,
in fact: it's called postgres, circa 1996 right after Berkeley abandoned
it. So one could hope that after several years you might have a viable
development community, but there's gonna be a lot of pain first.)
The recent fragmentation of development talent over in the mysql world
might change things, but it's still very unclear what the long-term
result will be. If I were about to choose a database to bet my company
on, I'd be afraid of picking mysql simply because its future development
path isn't clear. Oracle may own the copyright, but all the key
developers left, so it's definitely not clear that they'll be able to do
much with it for some time to come (even assuming that they want to).
And who knows which of the forks will succeed?
regards, tom lane
