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Content Tagged with licensing + MySQL

In 2000, MySQL co-founder David Axmark first told me about having met with Eben Moglen. His descriptions of Eben were always filled with respect and admiration — respect for a person who can keep his integrity and views of how software law should shape the world, and admiration for Eben’s pragmatism and ability to make a difference in the real world.

David Axmark	Michael “Monty” Widenius	Eben Moglen

Over the years since David’s first encounters, Eben and his later estabished Software Freedom Law Center have repeatedly provided MySQL and its founders with insightful advice. As a startup, initially without any VC financing, MySQL hasn’t always been able to compensate proportionately to the value created.

In recognition of the value created for MySQL through SFLC’s advice, especially on how Eben helped defend MySQL as a GPL developer against license breaches, David and Monty have decided to donate 100 000 dollars each to the SFLC. David and Monty hope this token of appreciation can help the SFLC to give legal advice to support some of today’s startups, who build their business on Free Software. They also hope to inspire other Open Source entrepreneurs to support the SFLC.

Note: SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Links:

• Software Freedom Law Center: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
• David Axmark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Axmark
• Michael “Monty” Widenius: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael Widenius
• Eben Moglen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen
• MySQL DevZone Interview with David: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/david-axmark.html
• SFLC Services: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/services/
• SFLC Donations: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/donate/
• MySQL Thanks the Free Software Foundation (7 Nov 2002): http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php?id=178
• MySQL Thanks the Software Freedom Law Center (8 May 2007): http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2007/05/08/software-freedom-law-center/

As reported yesterday from CommunityOne:

• MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source,
• so will the MySQL Connectors, and
• so will the main storage engines we ship.

In addition:

• MySQL 6.0’s pending backup functionality will be open source,
• the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
• the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,

where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.

The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products.

I’d like to shed some light on the big picture, in two different ways — openness, and the business model.

MySQL’s openness manifests itself in three ways:

• MySQL’s code is open.
• MySQL’s APIs are open.
• MySQL’s data formats are open.

These form a foundation around the MySQL Server and its connectors on which we (Sun), our partners, and the community can all freely build upon. And through this openness, we will always provide a means for our users to easily export their data from MySQL.

Then for MySQL’s business model. To financially support MySQL’s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it. We believe the model to be useful for both those who spend money to save time, and those who spend time to save money.

As Mårten mentioned yesterday in the CommunityOne panel, expect Sun/MySQL to continue experimenting with the business model, and with what’s offered for the community and what’s offered commercial-only. We won’t always know the right answer from the beginning, but we want MySQL to be the most popular database for both paying and non-paying users.

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

For both worlds, the concept of collaboration, participation and giving more power to their users is a key component. OSS projects need contributors for patches and bug reports, but also for feedback, translations, artwork, advocacy in order to be popular and healthy. The project's developers need to be open for suggestions, listening to their user base on where the project should be heading. They also usually strive for open standards and APIs, allowing easy combination and interaction with other Open Source Software so that other projects can build their work on top of theirs or compliment it. A successful OSS application gains popularity by the snowball effect: users of the product find it useful and recommend it to other users seeking for similar functionality. These too start to contribute to the project in various ways, making it in turn more useful and attractive for even more users and so on.

The same is true for Web 2.0 sites: they depend on a user base that creates and provides content that makes their site useful and popular, e.g. blog postings, pictures, articles and other content, but also by providing feedback and bug reports about the site itself and recommending it to others. A successful Web2.0 site needs to be as open to user feedback as a regular OSS project in order to remain attractive and maintain a loyal user base. So it's a lot about participation and empowering the users to contribute and control the content - the part that actually makes a site useful and attractive. Many of these Web2.0 sites also provide public APIs (e.g. SOAP, REST, XML-RPC or RSS, just to name a few acronyms) that allow others to access their services and functionality and reuse or combine them with their own work. And by using technologies like AJAX, most of these sites actually look and feel like regular desktop applications already.

But there is a strikingly difference: even while most Web2.0 sites are based on Open Source technology (e.g. the LAMP stack or Ruby on Rails), only very few ones actually carry on the OSS philosophy and make their own code available as Open Source as well. Not that they would have to do so, as there is this so-called ASP loophole in the GPL and most other OSS licenses: web sites are not actually distributing their application code, so they are not required to disclose the source of their applications.

But why do they break the chain here? One could argue that the obvious reason for that is that most web sites are created and maintained by companies, that are doing this for business reasons and want to maintain their competitive edge over others. However, many sites started as a hobby project by an individual or a small group and were converted into commercial entitities once they became successful. Even in these early stages it's rare that sites provide their source code. But isn't Web2.0 mostly about the users and content and not so much about the technology behind it? Would it really make a difference if the source code of a site is freely available?

In the OSS world, users could just fork off a project, if they don't feel the project is going the right direction or it has been abandoned by the original author. This sometimes leads to much better applications than what the original project came up with. This also leads to a healthy competition and to much better software with less duplication of work in the long run. And this is being recognized by more and more software companies as well - there is a large and growing number of OSS applications that are not maintained by a group of volunteers, but by a commercial entity.

In the Web2.0 world, people start creating new sites from scratch again and again, resulting in a vast amount of sites that serve a similar purpose, all with their own warts and deficiencies, splitting up the user base and available content. This causes fragmentation and makes it much harder to create one useful resource. And they are all on their own in maintaining and improving their sites, to fulfill the requests of their user base and keeping them happy and loyal.

I wonder if and when Web2.0 developers will embrace and extend the concept of sharing their code as well, to let others help them to become even more powerful and popular. Once a site has gained a certain popularity, there is plenty of new features that their users will ask for, or bugs and deficiencies that are in need of fixing. Making the source code available would allow others to jump in here, opening yet another channel of possible contributions and community-building. The Open Source community provides numerous lessons to learn from. True, others may then be able to take the code and create a site that provides the same services and experience. But they still would have to gain traction by creating a community and content before they would become a serious competition.

One great example of how this could be done is Wikipedia - they maintain Mediawiki (the application that powers their site) as a regular OSS project, which has made it one of the most popular and powerful Wiki applications around and has allowed others to create Wiki sites about all kinds of topics on their own.

And while it's not really true Web2.0 company, I also welcome Linden Lab's decision to open up the Second Life client source code. I am confident that the experiences they make with this will encourage them to consider opening the sources of the server code as well at some point...

But they both have grasped that it's not so much about the technology and software, but much more about the users and the content created by the community that makes them popular and successful. This is something one can't simply take and create a competing offering, even though the source code is available.

Our web team informed me that we received a few comments from users about MySQL AB supposedly shutting down the development of the MySQLFront utility. I?d just like to clarify that this was not the case at all ? we merely asked the developers to stop violating our trade mark as outlined in our Trade Mark Policy. As I wrote some time ago, our trade marks are a very important asset to us as a company and we need to take action, if our marks are being violated.

We did not ask or force them to stop the development or to remove the program from the market completely ? this was their very own decision. In fact, we actually encouraged them from the beginning of our discussion to continue the development of the product under a different name. The problem appeared resolved as the project was renamed to SQLFront and the old web site pointed to the new location ? we regret that the developers decided to shut down the entire project shortly afterwards.

We encourage and support every application that broadens the MySQL Ecosystem. Why would we want to completely shut off applications that support us?

Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.

For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.

While both activities are quite rewarding, the work at the compliance lab tends to be most interesting. We serve a wide variety of people and organizations who have a correspondingly wide range of experience, views and questions. This leads to rewarding experiences, as well as experiences that are more educational in nature.

While I don’t discuss the specific details of any particular question sent to the compliance lab, a recent exchance is being made public by the submitter (this isn’t that uncommon) and I don’t mind at least discussing the general issues encountered (and linking to the exchange, if I can find it.)

The submitter (let’s call them “Coyote”, if they decide to not post the messages and don’t want to be identified) has led me on a merry little goose chase where they seemed to work fairly hard to misinterprete most of the rather sloppy answers that I provided. As the mail thread grew and grew, I got more and more irritated (and sloppy).

Finally, at the climax of the exchange, this little gem emerged:

…

Me: Your questions have been less than clear.

Coyote: your answers have been less than forthcoming and offtopic. We can play this game all day, I have what I needed from you, I await Dave’s response.

Coyote: This issue can potentially apply to far more than this particular instance, however it is one that was easy to illustrate this. I will be publishing these emails in whole. Estoppel is a wonderful thing :)

Me: Coyote, stating that we don’t have a formal policy is hardly damning (unless I have a tremendously weak understanding of estoppel)

Coyote: There is more than the fact that you dont have an official policy, there are other things that were said that, as a whole, paint a picture. Estoppel can apply in this case when the whole picture is looked at instead of the individual peices by themselves. Maybe I caught you on a bad day but your responses to me now are less than professional, overreacting and infact somewhat childish. You were the one avoiding the gpl questions all along, and to a point belittling my knowledge a bit from the first reply, even after I explained my knowledge of certain facts you continued through at least 2 more replies continuing to avoid the question asked and belittling my knowledge.

Maybe after you get some sleep, smoke a cigarette, have a drink, or whatever it is that you do to relax things will change. I formally request that until this is done that you dont reply to me anymore except to forward Daves response on the issue.

This definitely raised my blood pressure a few notches. I may even have cursed… It is hard to remember because, as the kids say, I was so completely pwn3d.

However, the last bit of advice provided was rather good - I caught some dinner and had a cold one. Then I came back and wrote new, detailed and professional (or so I think) answers to every issue raised in each of the nine messages in the thread.

If you are working as a community advocate or ombudsman, you can’t give careless answers and you definitely can’t let yourself get suckered into exchanges that don’t help to solve the problem at hand. Your job is to give professional, ethical and considered advice to the communities you are supporting. Even if you write for one person, write as if everyone was watching.

In the end, Coyote didn’t seem to be very impressed by the improved answers - hopefully they will be more useful once he does whatever it is that he does to relax.

However, I felt pretty good about it - while I did get pointlessly upset for a bit, going back to give more considered responses meant that I am now thinking a bit more clearly about the specific issue of how trademarks interact with the GPL and the broad issue of how other mechanisms can limit the freedom of Free Software licenses. Also, I do mean to provide good service to people who write the Compliance Lab - I did a bad job on the first round and doing a better job on the second round gave me a good feeling.