Zac Bowling’s Blog

Hello Zac,

Thank you for your support. You wrote: We have a product that we have been developing for the past 6 months. Its mostly a serviced based application providing GPS data to our customers via webservices (SOAP). We also develop a few different clients to view the data some opensource and some binary release (because of other licences we must follow for code we have included).

Our server product currently supports any ODBC compliant database, as well as a light weight, XML flat-file data storage system. We currently have no plans at this time to sell the server side product (even though it has been designed to be very portable).

Now if we were going to write a client for our software for some customer, and wrote it to pull our data to the client side via our webservice and store locally in a MySQL, but gave all the source code to do so to the customer under a GPLed licence with an upgrade subscription (similar to RedHat), would that be covered without having to purchase a commerical licence?

Would it possible to include MySQL and MySQL’s source to the client and then use it with our product via ODBC (blind to the fact that the fact that it was talking to a MySQL server) and distrubute our product under a binary licence?

What would really help me is you could tell me if I’m allowed to access MySQL via ODBC from my application and distrubute and sale my code as binary and include a MySQL distrobution (w the MySQL source code), as well as my modular XML flat file based storage module that we developed with it to give my customers a choice when they install?

I am a huge fan and contributer to the open source community (I’m always developing OS applications in my free time and I spend a lot of time over at Debian mailing list and #Debian on freenode helping other users out) but this product is for my company (which the partners in the company don’t understand open source and the free software movement). I have to work around my partners but keep the costs of the development low.

Typically, as long as all of your application’s components abide by the terms of the GPL, you may distribute and use MySQL under the terms of the GPL. Therefore if you distribute the MySQL source you must distribute ALL of your applicaton’s source.

I hope that helps. If you have additional questions please feel free to contact me anytime or refer to the GPL at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/GPL_license.html.

Best,
Rena

Rena Dosono
Inside Sales Executive
MySQL, Inc. www.mysql.com
Office: 253-872-0970
Email: rena@mysql.com

Are you MySQL certified? www.mysql.com/certification