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Monty Program AB's Suggestion to EU Commission to Get Rid of the GPL on MySQL

By Pamela Jones et al.

I will now share with you a small section of the Monty Program AB's submission to the EU Commission, including its suggestion to replace the GPL with a more proprietary-friendly license, specifically the Apache license.

I mentioned it in my first article on the Oracle/Sun deal, telling you that the submission [PDF] they made public wasn't the only one:

But that isn't the only submission they have made. They suggested to the EU Commission in a questionnaire submitted by an August 13th deadline that the license on MySQL be changed to the Apache License. It was sent to me, along with others in the press, to educate us on the issues.

It seems some in the media contacted Florian Mueller, and he apparently denied the accuracy of what I wrote. So let me show you just this one piece of the document I was describing, and I'll let you decide for yourself, from page 19:

We would like to draw attention to the fact that some major concerns about the effects of the proposed transaction could be somewhat alleviated by requiring that all versions of MySQL source code previously released under the GPLv2 license ...must be released under a more liberal open source license that is usable also by the OEM users and would also create an opportunity for other service vendors to compete with offerings comparable to MySQL Enterprise. A good candidate is the Apache Software License.

So. Did I tell you the truth or not?

Full post as published by Groklaw on December 08, 2009 (boomark / email).