[wellylug] Writing commercial apps which connect to GPL software.

Stephen Judd sljudd at paradise.net.nz
Sun Mar 30 22:34:53 NZST 2003


On Sun, 2003-03-30 at 20:56, Nigel Walters wrote:

> 1.) Free to those who are 100% GPL 
> Well MS Office is proprietary and my friend may not be able to GPL his
> programs.

I agree, his app won't fall into this class - although if he sells
consulting on the back on this app, maybe he could consider GPLing it?
There's nothing that says you can't charge for GPL software...

> 2)Free to those who never copy, modify or distribute.
> Well, he would really need to distribute an unchanged version of MySQL
> (perhaps configured with his preferred settings)

Does he have to, really? If you distribute directions for installing
from MySQL's site, wouldn't that do? His software's installer could then
run the create scripts (or whatever) to create the schema...

> 3) Commercial use for anyone else.

If it comes to that, MySQL license fees are very reasonable.

> >From the perspective of the GPL it is the term 'link with' that counts.
> Does use of an ODBC link count to trigger the GPL licence requirement
> for connecting programs? 

As Peter's already observed, the FSF interpret "linking" in the sense of
incorporating code libraries. Normal network communication is not
linking in this sense.

Peter also mentioned Postgres. I think Postgres is the better DB, but
the Windows port is very difficult to set up, I hear, whereas MySQL on
Windows is much easier.

Perhaps it's worth looking at the SAP database, or Interbase as well?
Postgres and MySQL aren't the only open source databases out there now.

Stephen

-- 
Stephen Judd <sljudd at paradise.net.nz>


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