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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

A public company will have a board of directors who set the direction of the company; as such what is to stop the board from directing that the license be changed?

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I am sure they'll change their license, like some others have done:

https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-plat... https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-busines...

I don't think there is any place for GPL in databases and similar software, specially if it is to be built and run by for-profit companies.

I used to be opposed to GPL at moral level have have since changed my mind on this. It makes sense for anything that is essentially infrastructure -- operating systems, web servers, software firewalls -- to be GPL: improvements at this level are rarely something which gives a specific company a competitive advantage. In the cases where it would, however, I like the idea of dual-licensing so that a GPL project (for example: Linux) could be combined with proprietary code without needing to publish the changes. Right now anyone thinking along those lines (Sony, Netflix, Juniper, etc) chooses FreeBSD. In the case of the companies who have chosen FreeBSD for proprietary use they have, in many cases, ended up contributing work back to the parent project if for no other reason than self-interest in making updates to the base OS easier as their custom code remains slim. If Linux had been offering this dual-license option I think the examples above would have chosen Linux and there would have been contributions back to the parent project that aren't there today.

Yeah, but everything should be AGPL now instead of GPL. The software-as-service fiasco that changes the nature of "distribution" to bypass the open source requirements of licenses like GPL highlighted a loophole that corporates haven't hesitated in exploiting. AGPL has temporarily addressed this. However AGPL needs to go one more step and allow changing the license to plug any future loopholes. Right now, many GPL software cannot be automatically upgraded to AGPL license because we have to get permission from all the contributors to change the license. AGPL needs a clause that allows easy upgradation of the license retrospectively to ensure that the core concept can be defended in future too.

> If Linux had been offering this dual-license option

... then, most likely, Linux would never have taken off as contributors would have balked at the copyright assignment bureocracy, as well as not wanting to contribute to Linus's get-rich-quick scheme (why should Linus get special rights to profit of the work of the community?).

Owners of code can always change their licence. Being a public company with a board of directors doesn't change anything.

I always thought of MariaDB as a fork of GPLed MySQL code that is now owned by Oracle. However, I see that MariaDB uses a contributor agreement, and reserves some features for a proprietary(?) enterprise edition.

Do I misunderstand the copyright status of MySQL/MariaDB, or has MariaDB been clever about how it adds features to the GPL core, such that they're not legally derivative works?

They cannot change the license for the GPL code for which they do not own copyright, which is everything forked from MySQL proper.

All C corporations have a board of directors, not just publicly listed companies. If the BoD wanted to push to change the license they could have done that years ago.

MariaDB Server is guaranteed to remain open source. It will also always be available to the community. The MariaDB Foundation exists to support continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem, regardless of the actions of any company. https://mariadb.org/about/

The same thing that stops a sole developer from changing the license?

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