Posted by Toby A Inkster on 01/18/08 16:00

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:
> Gary L. Burnore <gburn...@databasix.com> wrote:
>
>> SUN has already said it'll be open source. Perhaps you're confusing
>> SUN with IBM or MicroSoft?
>
> I don't find any such reference. Do you have any URL?

Future versions will be licensed under the GPL. Don't need to quote any
sources for that -- SUN don't have any choice. One of the conditions in
the General Public Licence says that any derivative products must also be
distributed under the GPL. SUN cannot legally take MySQL and make it
proprietary without getting permission from every person who has ever made
a contribution to the current codebase, which must be *hundreds* of
independent developers.

Whatsmore, SUN would be incredibly unlikely to even *try*. Of the large
technology companies, SUN have one of the most consistently good open
source track records:

* They bought StarOffice from StarDivision and released the
source code under the GPL, starting the OpenOffice.org project
which they continue to contribute to;

* In the last couple of years, SUN have re-licenced most of
the Java platform under the GPL;

* Three years ago they open sourced most of their operating
system, Solaris, albeit not under the GPL, but their own
open source licence.

SUN are really not the bad guys!

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 19 days, 2:47.]

Ham vs Bacon vs Pork
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/01/17/pork-etc/

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