
MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL - endijs
https://blog.mariadb.org/mysql-man-pages-silently-relicensed-away-from-gpl/
======
drostie
Given the environment, you probably already know that there's a great talk
called 'Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos' at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)
.

The reason why it's relevant here is that this is not the first time that
Oracle has closed-sourced an open-source project bought up from Sun. Oracle
seems almost paraconsistent towards open-source in a very interesting way:
they seem to view the GPL as a good way to get other companies to help them
out without cheating (e.g. OpenJDK), but if they're going to do most of the
development in-house _anyway_ it seems they're much more willing to close the
source (OpenSolaris, now apparently MySQL).

Could anyone comment on whether there's a larger pattern that I'm missing
there? And are there other open-source technologies which were obtained from
the Sun buyout which are also in danger which we should know about?

~~~
michaelhoffman
Sun Grid Engine used to be open source, but now Oracle Grid Engine isn't. But
what's far worse, in my opinion as a user, is that Oracle made many of the
existing documentation and community support resources hosted by Sun
disappear.

~~~
beedogs
If it makes you feel any better, most of the big companies I work with are
moving full-stop from Solaris on SPARC to Linux on x86-64.

People who make the purchasing decisions are finally fed up with Oracle's
incompetence and utter contempt for the rest of the industry. It's a shame,
but I won't really miss Sun when they're finally, mercifully put to death. I
hate Oracle for what they did to that company and I wish nothing but ill
toward them.

~~~
dspillett
The problem with wishing the company death is that we _know_ what it will do
in the final times. It'll become another SCO generally making life
inconvenient for everyone for many years before we finally see the back of it.

~~~
flyinRyan
What do you suggest? They are making life inconvenient for everyone now and
will continue to do so. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and put up with
a one time pain and get it over with.

~~~
dspillett
Ideal world (i.e. never going to happen): let evil people keep buying their
stuff and getting screwed by them, but keep the rest of us out of it!

~~~
flyinRyan
Didn't the financial crisis teach you that we can't be kept out of it?

------
foobarbazqux
If they hold all the copyright on the documentation, they're free to do as
they please. It was always expected that Oracle would kill the project.

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL started by the founder of MySQL after the Oracle
acquisition. This is good news for them because it gives people more reason to
use the fork.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MariaDB)

~~~
belorn
I wonder if that statement is actually true. Has not a single distro made
fixes to the man pages throughout the years? Not a single Debian patch with
spell fixes or corrections gone upstream?

~~~
cbr
Many projects require copyright assignment in case they want to relicense. I
wonder if they did that here?

~~~
rodgerd
Yes, and this whole debacle is a great reminder of precisely why people should
be so leery of Canonical demanding copyright assignment for their GPL
projects.

------
mdesq
I used to work for Oracle. Something I heard several times around different
parts of the company was that Larry believed that open source was a good way
to build products, not businesses. He was more than happy to take advantage of
open source, but not willing to contribute to it. Oracle's attitude toward
open source was one of many reasons I left, and one of the reasons I gave for
why I was leaving.

~~~
gcb0
It would be ironic if you typed that on a mac or iphone.

~~~
jacobparker
That's... not very fair. Apple contributes a fair amount to many random open
source projects and also runs a number of important ones (Webkit, Clang, LLVM,
...)

The kernel to OS X/iOS is open source but this is not of any serious utility
as far as I know :P

~~~
oblio
Aaaand the AppStore basically destroys Open Source since it doesn't allow
distribution of GPL programs. If that's not FOSS hostile, I don't know what
is...

~~~
wavefunction
Make your own GPL app store. People can sideload all they want on their own
devices if they're really interested.

Besides, the iOS App store is pretty crappy anyways.

~~~
jacalata
Isn't restricting the use of open source software to those who are "really
interested" part way to destroying it?

~~~
wavefunction
I guess I'm just a pragmatist, and I don't believe in forcing Apple to do
anything with their own properties. If they want to conduct their business in
a way that is unethical but legal, so be it.

While we might bemoan the walled garden model that Apple has picked and most
people's seeming readiness to go along with it, you might be surprised at how
many people would be interested in a store specifically "curated" towards GPL
apps.

~~~
jacalata
You can simultaneously believe that something is justifiable/natural and that
it is destroying open source. I think the majority of people would not
jailbreak to use such a store, thus limiting the potential audience and
reducing the incentive for developers to release to it.

------
NelsonMinar
So who holds the copyright on these man pages? Did MySQL get copyright
assignments from all contributers before Oracle bought them? If not, how do
they have the authority to relicense the content?

~~~
michaelfeathers
I'm sure it even matters. GPL is copyleft. Doesn't that mean that they can not
relicense the same or derived work under a more restrictive license?

~~~
_delirium
Not being able to relicense under a more restrictive license is actually the
main element of copyleft.

With an MIT or BSD licensed work, you can add more restrictive conditions,
e.g. make a derived work proprietary, or add a "noncommercial use only" clause
to your derived work, or whatever else you want. But with a GPL-licensed work,
you cannot add additional conditions to the derived work, i.e. you must give
all downstream reusers the same permissions you received. That's what's
sometimes referred to as the "viral" property.

Unless, as here, you are the owner of the copyrights, in which case you can
apply any license you want to the work.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Not being able to relicense under a more restrictive license is actually the
> main element of copyleft.

Not being able to relicense under a license not acceptable to the authors of
the particular copyleft license at issue is a main element of copyleft, but
copyleft licenses often allow redistributing under more restrictive licenses
that remain acceptable to the copyleft license author (e.g., the FSF
encourages the use of "or any later version" language in GPL licenses, and
GPLv3 is in many respects more restrictive than GPLv2; further, GPLv3 allows
relicensing with specified kinds of additional terms that may in some ways be
more restrictive.)

~~~
foobarbazqux
Some more examples: the LGPL is copyleft and you can convert it to the GPL.
Sometimes the GPL comes with a special exception, which can also be removed.
AGPLv3 is more restrictive than GPLv3, and again you can convert GPLv3 to
AGPLv3.

If you consider what developers are allowed to do with a piece of software,
the main element of copyleft is actually not being able to relicense under a
_less_ restrictive license on the spectrum of FOSS licenses. The least
restrictive "license" of all is no license, no copyright, i.e. public domain
(in the US).

Because you can convert MIT/BSD to a closed source license, but you cannot
convert GPL to a closed source license, in this sense the GPL is more
restrictive than MIT/BSD. You can convert MIT/BSD to GPL (less to more) but
not GPL to MIT/BSD (more to less).

I understand that closed source licenses are the most restrictive of all, this
is just an alternative perspective on software freedom with regard to
developers.

------
ChuckMcM
Well they are Oracle. Perhaps they will rename it to 'TheirSQL' :-)

~~~
_ak
I know, I'm kind of a party pooper, but My, Maria and Max are the names of
Monty's children. Do you see the pattern? MySQL, MariaDB, MaxDB.

~~~
paul_f
Are you sure Mongo wasn't one of them? :-)

~~~
eksith
No, he rode off into the sunset after sheriff Bart freed him from Hedley
Lamarr

~~~
kaonashi
That poor horse.

~~~
eksith
It was a donkey! ;)

Speaking of beasts of burden, I've been atop my elephant (Postgres) for about
3+ years now and I feel it's harder and harder to deal with idiosyncrasies of
MySQL.

MariaDB is better, much better. And at work, when we do have clients already
on InnoDB, the first choice for upgrades is to move them off MySQL onto
MariaDB. All fresh work starts with Postgres. Being BSD licensed, docs and
all, it's the least painful legally and technically.

[http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/](http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/)

------
JeremyMorgan
Oracle is killing MySQL. On purpose. This has been going on for a while, and
they're not doing it because they're stupid, it's in their best interests.

Thankfully Maria is such a nice clean replacement.

~~~
mjhea0
So Oracle acquired Sun to stifle MySQL develop for fear that it would encroach
on their own DB.

However, by blatantly damaging the product, more and more users moved (and
continue to move) to better alternatives. Thus damaging the company's
reputation.

However, MySQL is hardly a competitor to Oracle. Oracle 11g is meant for use
at completely different type of company. I don't get it.

Time to donate to Apache. Sound familiar?

~~~
ilaksh
I have used MySQL and Oracle and I have found MySQL to be more reliable, more
performant, easier to configure, and easier to develop against.

I believe that in 80-90+% of the cases where Oracle is deployed, it is only
still being used because business executives are out of touch and don't want
to admit that the massive investments they committed their companies to are no
longer required.

~~~
cmccabe
MySQL's query optimizer is a joke compared to Oracle's. If you don't do joins
and just use it as a key-value store, that doesn't matter. MySQL also doesn't
enforce most SQL constraints like "can't store a string in an int field" etc.

~~~
ilaksh
Wow, that's interesting if the SQL constraints are all completely ignored..
seems doubtful.

My experience with Oracle's query optimization was that it was non-intuitive
to configure to work correctly especially with the way that the optimizer
statistics config works.

MySQL will do quite useful query optimization (for joins) if you have
appropriate indexes. So I think that in 80% of cases that is what matters in
both Oracle and MySQL -- creating appropriate indexes.

Honestly I don't think you know what MySQL is capable of.

------
marme
Is this even legal? they released the previous documentation under GPL v2
which has a clause stating any modified versions have to be released under the
same license. This new documentation is clearly just a modification of the
previous documentation. It would be interesting if it came of they did not
have the right to do this. If even even one line of the documentation was
written by someone else and they did not get a transfer of copyright they
could get sued for doing this.

~~~
josephlord
The copyright owner can license under whatever license they like. As many have
said even before it was sold to Sun all contributions needed a copyright
assignment before they were accepted (so they could sell the option to make
closed source modifications amongst other things) so Oracle can now license as
they wish.

What they can't do is revoke the existing GPL licenses so you can still
develop and modify the old docs.

Having said that this is Oracle and you should probably just run for the hills
(MariaDB) before Oracle make it hard to make it fully compatible with future
version of MySQL by doing something else.

------
brkcmd
According to mysql bug 69512 [1] this particular issue was the result of a
build process error and was not intentional.

[1]:
[http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512](http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512)

~~~
tnorthcutt
This is indeed the given explanation, but why on earth was there a separate
set of man pages with incorrect copyright headers?

------
frost_knight
And just in case they hadn't made their point, section 38 from the pastebin is
particularly friendly:

"This documentation is NOT distributed under a GPL license."

------
nivla
I have been really thinking about switching my DBs from MySQL to MariaDB.
Wondering if someone could help me out with a few questions..

Is it a really a drop-in replacement? Any gotchas I need to be aware off? How
does MariaDB compare with MySQL performance and memory wise? Did anyone face
any issues with replication?

Thank you in advance.

~~~
voidlogic
> How does MariaDB compare with MySQL performance

Slower last time _I_ tested with _my app_ on _my HW_. But you should test
_now_ with _your app_ now on _your HW_ of course to be sure :)

What I have heard is if you have lots of CPUs MariaDB doesn't scale up as
well. If you scale out, that might not matter.

~~~
gcr
Why would this be so? MariaDB started from _the same source tree_ that MySQL
had. In order for performance to drop, a Maria developer would have to
_intentionally commit changes that lower performance._

~~~
wging
We're not talking about performance loss but a relative performance
difference. It's at least possible that MySQL might've introduced performance
gains that MariaDB didn't get. I have no idea whether this is the case.

------
atoponce
What is Wordpress going to do if MySQL goes closed source? Switch to MariaDB,
or finally start supporting more databases, such as PostgreSQL?

~~~
__david__
MariaDB certainly seems like the path of least resistance in this case.

~~~
flyinRyan
Which means Monty has screwed everyone again. He should have let MySQL die in
Oracle's cradle so the open source world could move over to a better database:
PostgreSQL.

------
tehwalrus
I'm already using LibreOffice. Is there a fork of VirtualBox that I should be
aware of too? If I actually used any databases, I'd be switching MySQL for
MariaDB right now.

~~~
JoshTriplett
There's no free fork of VirtualBox, though various Linux distributions do
clean up the upstream source themselves. However, KVM has gotten quite good
these days; you might give it a try.

~~~
scott_karana
Unfortunately, I can't run KVM on my Windows workstation... :(

~~~
bskap
Windows 8 comes with Hyper-V.

~~~
astrodust
The nice thing about VirtualBox and VMWare is they're both cross-platform,
meaning images for them will boot on different types of systems. That's what
makes Vagrant ([http://vagrantup.com/](http://vagrantup.com/)) so flexible and
useful on teams with mixed environments.

------
duskwuff
I wouldn't grab the torches and pitchforks unless/until it's clear they're
relicensing to a non-free license. The GPL is written to apply to code; it
doesn't make much sense to apply it to documentation.

~~~
tedivm
The license they moved to is right there in the blog post, with a relevant
snippet from the text-

>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.

I'm not sure how much clearer they could be that it's not a free license.

~~~
gcr
> ...are provided under a license agreement...

How do you know that specific license isn't the GPL?

That blurb restates common law. It does not interfere with the specific
license that the documentation was covered under, it's just there to remind
people.

~~~
rlpb
Indeed. But there's a further blurb below that which specifically states that
the manpage is not under the GPL and that restricts redistribution and
modification.

------
jbpadgett
Has Oracle has eroded credibility for being a good steward for any open source
technology at this point? My question is how long before @Mitchellh leads an
effort to fork VirtualBox to allow Vagrant to have a reliable future?

------
jurre
It's kind of sad seeing something digging it's own grave like that.

~~~
Legion
I've long moved to Postgres and never want to go back, but I am glad to see
just how thoroughly the MySQL community up and moved on to MariaDB. Linux
distros are now shipping with it as the default "MySQL".

That represents a very good effort to take an open project and keep it open.
Two thumbs up for the community. Now, if we can just talk about silently
munging data instead of giving proper errors...

------
benstein
It was a bug. Corrected.
[http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512](http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=69512)

------
flyinRyan
If you're going to switch away from MySQL anyway, I would suggest taking the
hit and moving to PostgreSQL.

------
praguebakerr
Switch to MariaDB but don't even think you will remove MySQL experience from
your CV. As most of the CV is processed automatically you could lost few point
simple because lazy HR people don't care about what's happening in the IT
world.

~~~
gdulli
On the other hand, taking things like MySQL and PHP off your resume will lead
to working with the kind of people who don't like to use MySQL or PHP. Not a
bad thing. Avoiding working for a company where an HR department screens your
resume instead of a hiring manager is another plus.

------
wheaties
Hmm, so there's a bunch of hosted MySQL providers. How long before they become
MariaDB hosted providers?

Oracle, your engineers know exactly what will happen. Why don't you?

~~~
hexis
> Oracle, your engineers know exactly what will happen. Why don't you?

I think Oracle knows what they're doing. Oracle likes paying customers and I
suspect that they don't make much, if anything, on MySQL users. I've been
using MySQL for years and I've never knowingly paid Oracle a dime.

~~~
arkitaip
Why do you think they acquired MySQL in the first place?

~~~
jamespo
A nice side effect of acquiring Sun, nothing more

~~~
dyno12345
Why did they buy MySQL engine providers Innobase and Sleepycat a few years
earlier?

~~~
ams6110
AFAIK Oracle didn't really have an offering in the embedded DB market before
that. So at least that sort of makes sense. MySQL doesn't compete with
Oracle's database, so buying it to kill it doesn't make sense.

~~~
dyno12345
That could explain Sleepycat, but not Innobase which was platform-specific to
MySQL

------
gesman
Viva Maria!

------
maxharris
I am _more_ interested in using MySQL for my next project now.

I know that this is not a popular opinion, but I disagree with the philosophy
behind the GPL. While I think that sharing is fine (and for that there are the
BSD and MIT licenses, among many others), I believe that it is very often
better for both developers (and users) if users pay for the software they use.
(And yes, I have heard the pro-GPL argument about how you can charge for
support, but I know that's bogus in practice.)

I am _not_ saying the GPL should be outlawed or anything like that. I'm just
saying that it's not a moral ideal (the actual moral ideal is _you_ making a
sustainable living off of the code _you_ write), and it's practically speaking
a bad idea in many cases.

~~~
tjr
What do you find preferable about BSD and MIT licenses in this respect?

~~~
trippy_biscuits
My employer's legal department loves BSD and MIT licenses because it's easier
to sell software that way. When we need to update or add a new library or
application, BSD/MIT licensed software get approved much more quickly. For
example, we need to update the snmp package but we can't get it through legal
because the license for many of the modules changed to GPLv3. A new python
module would really make some things easier, but we can't get it through legal
(GPL again).

~~~
belorn
I must ask, have your employer ever purchased a proprietary application/module
to use in any product? In a logical world, those kind of deals should have a
ever worse time going through the legal department than GPL.

