maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Arjen Lentz <arjen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Henrik

On 09/10/2009, at 5:28 AM, Henrik Ingo wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:42 AM, Michael Widenius  
> <monty@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Henrik> I then of course have not had time to write the intro. (I  
> > don't mind
> > Henrik> if someone else does it, as long as the legal text is as  
> > above, minus
> > Henrik> the last paragraph.)
> >
> > I would however like to know what problems the lawyer had with my
> > paragraph.
>
> If you mean...
>
> a) your original promise text:
> "Monty Program Ab agrees that when it dual licenses code, it will not
> restrict the way the third party licensee uses the licensed copy of
> the code nor restrict how they use their own code. "
>
> ...the lawyer never saw it. It was my "devils advocate reading" of it
> that made me think someone could say we cannot distribute MariaDB as
> GPL (since it has restrictions :-)


That reading is incorrect, or rather - incomplete/unclear depending on  
your subject matter knowledge.
It's unambiguous to me.
Your reasoning above however is as far as I can see, incorrect in two  
ways.

First:
GPL provides additional freedoms to users, compared to the standard  
copyright which is the baseline. By default the IP owner holds *all*  
the rights and the user *none*, so asserting that a license  
"restricts" is silly, you can't get <0 rights - yes I know, people say  
this all the time anyway, particularly about GPL, but the baseline  
they presume is just wrong.

Second:
When dual licensed (best be clear and just say non-GPL/BSD license),  
there is a specific license in place which can do anything it likes,  
that's again the perogative of the IP holder.
However, that's is not about GPL at all, and thus the sentence does  
not refer to GPL-licensed MariaDB.


Cheers,
Arjen.
--
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
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