“Interpreting what the GPL actually means is a job best left to those that read the future by examining animal entrails.”

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List: php-general
Subject: RE: [PHP] php5 and mysql licences
From: Rasmus Lerdorf
Date: 2003-06-30 17:29:00
[Download message RAW]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Dan Joseph wrote:
> Is the mysql client library going to be put back in for future betas? Or
> are we mis-reading the change log and its still there?

There will always be MySQL support in PHP of one kind or another. The
only change in PHP5 is that we are no longer bundling the client library
itself. Some reasons in no particular order:

1. Most systems these days already have the client library installed.
2. Given 1, having multiple versions of the library can get messy.
For example, if you link mod_auth_mysql against 1 version and PHP
against another and then enable both in Apache, you get a nice fat
crash. Also, the bundled library didn’t always play well with the
installed server version the most obvious symptom of this being
disagreement over where to find the mysql.socket unix domain socket
file.
3. Maintenance was somewhat lax and it was falling further and further
behind the released version.
4. Future versions of the library are under the GPL and thus we don’t
have an upgrade path since we cannot bundle a GPL’ed library in a
BSD/Apache-style licensed project. A clean break in PHP5 seemed like
the best option.

This won’t actually affect that many people. UNIX users, at least the
ones who know what they are doing, tend to always build PHP against their
system’s libmyqlclient library simply by doing –with-mysql=/usr when
building PHP.

For the beta1 release, it went out without a mysql.dll extension because
we haven’t quite worked out how to handle it, not because the final PHP5
release will not have MySQL support. Of course it will and Windows users
will not be affected.

-Rasmus

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