[Haskell-cafe] HDBC's future and request for help

[John Goerzen]

On 02/22/2011 01:33 PM, Chris Dornan wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Two thoughts: is there any prospect of making HDBC available under a
> BSD-like license? The LGPL license is a significant barrier for me and I
> expect it will be for others.

I'm happy to discuss this with people.  It would be helpful to 
understand concrete cases where this would be a problem.  I have 
permitted other code to be relicensed under BSD in the past and so don't 
have a huge hangup about this.  If it's the best thing for the 
community, I'd be likely to do it.  On the other hand, I have seen 
numerous cases over the years where BSD code has been taken by some 
company and essentially forked into a proprietary version.  I feel this 
is not in the long-term interests of the community, and that drawback 
has to be weighed against any advantage.

> And, along the lines of your own comments, the ODBC interface raises a
> significant (technical) barrier for MySQL users. Is there any chance
> that we can encourage/help getting the the MySQL driver closer to
> production quality?

The short answer is probably to send patches to its author or fork it. 
Or fund someone else to do so.

-- John