Posted on 5 Comments

OpenOffice.org, MySQL… aren’t they both owned by Sun?

I have a story for you. Don’t fall asleep now – can’t promise a happy ending though. There is no ending yet.

Once upon a time… there was OpenOffice.org. Version 2 of this product has a Base product, and the other components (Calc, etc) can also interface with databases through JDBC/ODBC, but the native db interface is something called SDBC which is kinda like a C++ version of JDBC.

A few years back, Georg Richter spent hundreds of hours of his spare time writing a native SDBC driver to connect OpenOffice.org to MySQL, so that it can interface without going through JDBC or ODBC layers. Cool, huh?

Now, what needs to happen is that this code goes into the main OpenOffice.org codebase. That in itself is not a problem, but there’s a catch: OpenOffice.org is LGPL licensed. The licensing of the SDBC driver is not an issue, rights can or already have been signed through the Sun contributor license thing. But the MySQL client library, which the SDBC driver uses, is GPL licensed. And so there is a linking problem.

Enter the Sun acquisition of MySQL. Since MySQL owns its code, Sun now owns the client library code. Hmm.

So for StarOffice, it could now link against the MySQL client library and have this native interface operational. I don’t think this has been done yet, but it seems like a real obvious and easy advance for these Sun products!

OpenOffice.org is more complicated. Unless Sun/MySQL were to re-license the MySQL client library as LGPL or compatible license (for this type of linking, having an LGPL-licensed app is quirky so the situation is rather unique) it just can’t be in there. And MySQL still uses its GPL licensing of the client code as dual licensing business model leverage for some of its revenue. MySQL Sales would be very unhappy if this were changed, although personally I feel that it’s old and irrelevant. But letting go of an old and familiar revenue stream can be painful on the brain, I do appreciate that 😉

How will this story unfold, will there be happy endings and ever-afters? We’ll see!

Posted on 5 Comments

5 thoughts on “OpenOffice.org, MySQL… aren’t they both owned by Sun?

  1. The next major OpenOffice release will do exactly what you proposed 🙂

  2. Yes, the corresponding development teams have meet and started discussing how to work together.

    You know, there’s a small 400 people company which has got over night some 35.000 new employees. That’s about 90 new employees for each MySQLer to train. And that’s at least 90 new ideas on new developments for each of us to review and make happen.

    If you are open minded, its like shopping for free in a hardware store trying to find something to pimp your house. You must be blind if you fail to find anything of interest for you. There are so many new tools to play with and OpenOffice is just one of them.

    OOo has become amazingly popular. OpenOffice 2.4 (http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.4.0.html), which has been released recently, has been downloaded 2.000.000 (!) times in the week after the release.

    Back to the driver: something has been on the roadmap even before Sun acquired MySQL simply because OOo is so popular. And yes, we hope to have something ready in time for OpenOffice 3.0/3.1. Georg is really eager to work on it now that the license issue is no show stopper any more.

    Ulf

  3. Excellent, tell more please!
    What will the licensing be like of the client library component?

    Didn’t anyone blog about this? If not why not? It’s massive, it’s fantastic!
    It’s not an announcement of yet another bit of blah, it’s real cool stuff!

  4. Arjen,

    sorry, but I didn’t find the time to blog about – I had to write some code 🙂

    The license of the code will be LGPL 3.0 (like OpenOffice) – it still uses libmysql. The code will be available via cvs.openoffice.org pretty soon.

    If you’re interested in testing some binaries, check out the new preview version at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Connector_OpenOffice

    /Georg

  5. […] while ago I wrote about native MySQL connectivy for OpenOffice.org which Georg Richter had spent a lot of time on, but which then got stuck in some licensing foo. […]

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