MySQL Man Pages Silently Relicensed Away From GPL

An anonymous reader writes "The MariaDB blog is reporting a small change to the license covering the man pages to MySQL. Until recently, the governing license was GPLv2. Now the license reads, 'This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.'"

This affects distributions

[Cassini2]

Most distributions include the documentation with any software packages distributed. Without a GPL or free software license on the documentation, the distributions must either:
(a) comply with the license,
(b) provide a third-party download (like Adobe with Flash), or
(c) stop including MySQL.
Given the existence of MariaDB, it might be simplest to stop including MySQL in the distribution.

Re:good

[jedidiah]

Software is. This manpage change appears to be implying that the corresponding software is covered by some license other than some variant of the GPL as the given restrictions are incompatible with that license.

Re:Is this legal?

[Hewligan]

No, MySQL has always required copyright assignment for stuff to be included.

Re:good

[Forever Wondering]

From the blog, the old documentation said:

This documentation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it only under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

IANAL, but it looks like a GPL violation to me.

Just use Postgres

[SplashMyBandit]

Just use Postgres - and get on with whatever it is you have to do :)

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? If they own the copyright, they are free to relicense a piece of data (and more importantly any new versions of it) under any terms they wish.
This doesn't change the fact that the copy you downloaded previously under the GPL stays that way, and you can redistribute it indefinitely.

captcha: darlings

Assigned

[tepples]

You can't steal my copyright or that of my friends who wrote them.

Ellison can't steal it, but if this comment [slashdot.org] is to be trusted, you already signed it away.

Re:good

[shentino]

If outsiders contributed to it they are no longer the sole copyright owners.

Re:good

[eht]

MySQL was always dual licensed, they always required copyright to be assigned to them for contributions so they could monetize it on the side.

Re:good

[Bruce Perens]

If they own the copyright, they are free to relicense a piece of data

Sorry to be pedantic, but replace "a piece of data" with "a work of authorship". If there isn't the creative work of a human being involved, it's not copyrightable. And then we get to this:

17 CFR 102(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

And that means that even when the hand of man is involved, a lot of things are still not copyrightable.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sounds like a mistake.

[nryeng]

You're right. This is an unintentional change that will be reversed. http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512 [mysql.com]