[ale] First Steps to Licensing My Software?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:51:31 -0500
"James Taylor" <James.Taylor at eastcobbgroup.com> wrote:

> You can buy a commercial license of MySQL from Sun so that you can
> distribute your code commercially, but I'm pretty sure PHP will not
> give you that option.  Of course PHP isn't really something I would
> think you try to license anyway.  It's plain-text scripting, right?

You only need a commercial license for MySQL if you distribute a
proprietary application which _mandates_ the use of MySQL as a database
storage engine.

The easiest way around that is to create proprietary applications that
talk to something like ODBC, and write them geared towards the lowest
common denominator in database systems.  If you want to only support
one RDBMS so that you can exploit its featureset to the max, I'd
recommend PostgreSQL---it can be linked in with both free and
proprietary software, and has a richer feature set than MySQL does.  It
has the added advantage of being relatively easy to support---and if
you have to choose only one database system, I'd say that it's probably
the best one to support, both from a licensing and a feature
perspective.

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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