JDBC, MySQL and the GPL
I discovered something really quite annoying today. The JDBC drivers for MySQL have been re-licensed from LGPL to GPL (happened quite a while back actually). Now while it’s their code and they can do with it as they please, that’s really, really annoying. I’ll be moving all my development away from MySQL in the future.
Here’s the problem. I came up with a really cool new feature for a product I’m working on which involves interacting with a variety of databases and inevitably someone will want to use it with MySQL. This feature would be a small add-on to a much larger commercial product. In order to use the official MySQL drivers though I’d either have to pay MySQL or GPL my application. Neither of which is a realistic option considering how insignificant this one feature is in the overall product.
So now I’m developing the prototype with Microsoft SQL Server and it’s going great. MySQL, there appears to be a bullet shaped hole in your foot.
February 3rd, 2005 at 7:02 am
MySQL Licensing is a whole lot less than SQL Server. If you already had SQL Server, then why not just use it?
PostgresQL is LGPL I believe.
May 29th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I’m having the exact same problem. I need to be able to fetch data from a multitude of sources - like MS SQLServer, Firebird, MySQL, Oracle, CSV-files, and such in my software.
None of the JDBC-drivers except for MySQL uses GPL, and since the other components are a part of my software, they incidentally become “Derived Work” from MySQL as soon as I include the MySQL-jdbc-driver. So not only do I have to release my own code under GPL - much of which is heavilly derived from Batik, but all of the other components also have to be released under GPL, and we all know that’s not going to happen.
And just as in your software, MySQL is a really tiny part of the application, that isn’t going to be used much at all. So because of their GPL-license, it seems I’m going to have to drop the support for MySQL-databases (unless they give me an extremely good price on their non-GPL:ed JDBC-driver), which kind of sucks…
In fact, I don’t really understand why they want to make money of the JDBC-driver. Normally you’d pay for the database-server-software, and the software for connecting to the server would be free to use as you like. Otherwise there isn’t a single piece of software that would be able to use the database-server, and sales would plummet…