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?
Just to remind you: tonight at 19:00 we'll meet at our usual place - please see me
previous announcement for details. According to the RSVPs I received, we should be around 20 people. Paul McCullagh will talk about the
PBXT Storage Engine, so this sounds like a fun evening. See you there!
Two days ago we added the
University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License to the list of licenses in the
MySQL FLOSS license exception. In my opinion
exception is actually a badly chosen word -
extension would probably be more sufficient here as it actually extends the scope of the MySQL client libraries license. From the introductionary text on top of the document:
We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software ("FLOSS") applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries (the "Program") despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License (the "GPL").
In other words, the license exception allows the distribution of a derived work including the MySQL Client Libraries under a number of
OSI-approved Open Source Licenses. This allows a broader range of (non-GPL) Open Source applications to link against the MySQL Client libraries. In essence, it makes the GPL less restrictive.
