MySQL Man Pages Silently Relicensed Away From GPL 243
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.'"
Sounds like a mistake. (Score:5, Insightful)
They offer things under two licenses: GPL and commercial. IMO, it is far more likely that some build script broke and failed to replace the copyright notice on the GPLed export than that Oracle has decided to try to take the man pages proprietary.... :-)
Re:This affects distributions (Score:2, Insightful)
Most likely the choice will be:
(d) write free documentation
Debian does this quite often. See: Debian with GFDL licensed documentation.
Re:This affects distributions (Score:5, Insightful)
(d) provide the old documentation, which didn't come with any such restrictions.
The Correct way to look at this situation, is that MySQL has died and is no longer being maintained by its owner. The last [GPLed] version was the last version.
Re:good (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not possible for the copyright holder to commit a license violation.
Re:Is this legal? (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer is "Yes" and the long answer is that they already gave the permission or MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle wouldn't have accepted the contribution.
Re:User trust violation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: good (Score:3, Insightful)
If you hold the copyright, you can choose to license it however you want. What is untested in court is if a license change can retroactively apply to a fork.
Re:glad i am moving to mariaDB (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad I moved to PostgreSQL.
(Nothing to do with Oracle screwing it up - I moved back around the 6.4 relase. IMHO Postgres was always better on Linux/Unix, and MySQL's popularity is really only due to it having a Windows installer first.)
That's not at all why MySQL was popular. It was dead simple to get started on, you could dump/reload databases to text files trivially, and you could learn on a platform with minimal support for everything so there wasn't a stack of binders work of documentation. It was fast, free, had minimal complexity for a DB, and had a clear path from first tutorial to production.
Enough already! (Score:5, Insightful)
You've been kicking this one back and forth for a decade or more! If you knuckleheads would have used BSD licensed PostgreSQL from the git-go instead of MySQL's crazy now-you-see-me-now-you-don't license you would have freed up so much time and intellectual horsepower that you'd have your fucking flying cars by now.
Slashdot. It's like herding cats, except cats are cleaner.
Re:User trust violation (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone saw the writing on the wall and switched to MariaDB a few months ago. In for a repeat show?
This is the great thing about free software, once its free, you have a hard time closing it back up. Someone just forks the last free version and keeps going, and you get ignored unless you can contribute something the Free versions don't, which is unlikely.
Re: This affects distributions (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess I was saying that, in regards to the time of the reps, it's always worth their time.
Call up an Oracle rep (assuming you are not already an Oracle customer) asking for a quote on a 5 user base Oracle database license and see how long it takes him to get back to you.
Re: good (Score:2, Insightful)
(Bloody hell, it appears I've fat-fingered the post button... with no preview, looks like this "tablet" version of /. ain't all it's cracked up to be.)
What you've missed is that MySQL contributors have always been required to assign copyright over, so that the current owner of MySQL is able to retain this control. If you retain copyright over your contributions, yeah, they need your permission to de-GPL the whole shebang, but that doesn't apply here.
Re:They're making friends like nobody's business! (Score:5, Insightful)
Your memory of IBM differs from my own.