maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sergey Vojtovich <notifications@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Since Alexey's patch wasn't yet accepted by MySQL we need his
> confirmation that we can take it under BSD-new or MCA
> terms. @akopytov, could you confirm?

That _really_ is completely ridiculous! So here we have a patch. You will
gladly accept it from MySQL/Oracle under GPL v2, without any special
conditions. But the very same patch, submitted directly by the original
author, you will not take??!?

Now, obviously this is not something Sergey Vojtovich invented on his own, I
doubt he even agrees personally. So Otto, you specifically asked me to be
more vocal about MariaDB Foundation issue. Can we please have your personal
opinions on this idea of BSD/contributer agreement for selected potential
contributers?

I have from the very start of MariaDB been strongly opposed to any form of
contributer agreements or reciprocal licensing. Fortunately, we never really
had it in practice, since all major contributions (MySQL@Oracle, XtraDB,
oqgraph, sphinx, tokudb, galera, ...) were GPL only.

But recently we have this message to potential contributers that the MariaDB
Foundation "needs" to have BSD or MCA. This is extremely disrespectful for
at least two reasons:

 - There clearly is no such "need", since the Foundation receives GPL rights
   only to a large part of new contributions to MariaDB - for example from
   Galera, MySQL@Oracle, Percona.

 - Selected contributers are except from this requirement. For example,
   according to my information, large parts of the MariaDB code to which
   the company SkySQL/MariaDB Corporation has full rights, they are _not_
   required to provide BSD/MCA for to the MariaDB Foundation.

Otto, I strongly encourage you to look to other successful Free Software
projects such as the Linux Kernel, where an important part of the success
is the deliberate choice of GPL-only _without_ any reciprocal licensing. I
urge you to re-consider, and take a personal stance against this BSD/MCA
nonsense, and work strongly for an official GPL-only contributer policy.

Meanwhile, I encourage all contributers to _not_ accept this BSD/MCA
requirement. If you disagree, be aware that there is no such strong
requirement, and the major part of contributions to MariaDB are done without
this requirement. If your contribution is accepted, but under condition of
BSD/MCA, and you disagree, ask on the mailing list for someone else with
commit rights to push your patch. I am sure there are several that will be
willing to do so.

 - Kristian.