To fend off the European Commission’s concerns about the Sun/MySQL acquisition, Oracle has made a public commitment to maintain certain aspects of the MySQL open source business offering. They include: continuing to make available Storage Engine APIs, a pledge not to assert that third party vendor’s implementations of storage engines must be released under the GPL (“A commercial license will not be required by Oracle from third party storage engine vendors in order to implement the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.”), and continuing to “enhance MySQL and make subsequent versions of MySQL, including Version 6, available under the GPL.” Oracle also pledged to increase spending on MySQL research and development.
This is an interesting approach. It also is an interesting example of public messaging about not reserving the right to make aggressive stands on GPL interpretation or enforcement.
