![[Main Page]](/wikinerds3.png)
SCO Group Inc. announced on 3 September 2005 that it entered an agreement with MySQL AB to deliver a certified commercial version of MySQL for SCO OpenServer 6. Furthermore, the agreement covers a wide range of joint sales, training, support and other programs, and new customers of SCO OpenServer will also receive a MySQL Network trial subscription, and full subscriptions will be sold through SCO's reseller channel, according to the official press release.
This move may potentially result in criticism of MySQL AB by the free/libre software community, and a Slashdot poster already asked: "Why would MySQL decide to work directly with a company that has deemed the GPL as unconstitutional?".
MySQL AB is a company based in Sweden, Europe, which develops and supports the popular MySQL relational database management system. The MySQL database system is often used in conjuction with PHP and other languages for the creation of dynamic websites. The MySQL database is distributed under the terms of the GPL licence (also used by the Linux kernel and thousands of other free software projects).
SCO Group Inc. is a company based in Utah, USA, which operates from 1979 in the UNIX market. It claims that it "owns" the core UNIX operating system, and in 2003 it launched a litigation campaign against IBM allegedly because the latter copied or used "intellectual property" of SCO in Linux, an operating system kernel which is usually combined with the GNU system to form the basis of modern distributions like Debian. Other companies active in the GNU/Linux market, including Red Hat and Novell, were involved in the lawsuits later, while SCO demanded that Linux users should pay it a fee in order to buy a license. Lawyers working for SCO claimed in 2003 that GPL was unconstitutional.
As a result of the attack on Linux and GPL, the majority of developers and supporters of free/libre open-source software disapprove SCO, and some of them even considered stopping to support SCO compilation in GCC (GNU Compiler Collection). Eben Moglen, professor of law at Columbia University Law School and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation explained why SCO's claims were invalid and SCO later ceased using these claims as affirmative defence. Free Software Foundation, the organisation founded by Richard Stallman (the original author of GPL and inventor of copyleft) for the promotion and protection of free software worldwide, made clear its position opposing SCO in its litigation tactics, while Eben Moglen published a paper entitled "Questioning SCO: A hard look at nebulous claims" which offers great insight into this case.
The new partnership of SCO with MySQL may make more open-source software developers migrate to the PostgreSQL database system, which is licensed under the BSD licence and its history goes back to software developed in the academia. Soon after the SCO-MySQL story appeared on Slashdot.org, another story seeking comparisons between MySQL and PostgreSQL made its debut on the same site, with its poster asking "What does the horizon look like for the development of these programs, especially considering the recent MySQL partnership with SCO?".
The text of this story is Copyright (C) 2005 by Nikolaos S. Karastathis. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".