acronym LAMP

[Derek Broughton]

Florian Diesch wrote:

> Derek Broughton <derek at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> 
>> CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
>>
>>> There are important differences between the GPL and BSD
>>> licenses that may or may not make a difference in your particular use
>>> case. It is a good idea to understand what they are before you commit to
>>> one or the other. The BSD license, which is how PostgreSQL is licensed,
>>> is the more permissive of the two.
>>
>> It is, but I honestly can't see how it matters to any program that _uses_
>> a
>> database.  You're not modifying the database code, so for almost all uses
>> either GPL or BSD is irrelevant.
> 
> You have to buy a commercial licence if you want to use the MySQL
> client libs in non-FLOSS software, see
> <http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/>
> 

Actually no.  What Sun says is you have to buy a license to _distribute_ the 
MySQL client with non-FOSS software ("Sun’s [FOSS] License Exception ... 
allows developers of FOSS applications to include Sun's MySQL Client 
Libraries ... with their FOSS applications"). 

But you generally _don't_ use the client libs in non-FLOSS software.  For 
instance, I do all my RDBMS work with SQLAlchemy these days.  Somewhere in 
there it actually calls a Python DB-API library for Oracle, Postgres or if I 
really wanted to, MySQL.  Which one I use is irrelevant, but I don't have to 
get a commercial license for it unless I want to distribute it _in_ non-Free 
software (now the really interesting and hairy part of the MySQL license 
says that if I _have_ the MySQL driver I can't tell anybody else how to 
_get_ the MySQL driver...).
-- 
derek