One can run a commercial website backed by MySQL using the GPL license. The GPL only requires you to release your code if they link off each other and you're d

One can run a commercial website backed by MySQL using the GPL license. The GPL only requires you to release your code if they link off each other and you're distributing the application. Web sites don't usually have their code distributed. Even if you are distributing the code, it's very likely that you don't need to distribute it as GPL, but that's a longer discussion. Suffice it to say, you don't need a commercial MySQL license to run a website. There's no weekend project that's going to be "fully scalable". Scaling isn't just grabbing a NoSQL backend and declaring victory. A lot of scaling is figuring out how you're going to use your data and creating data structures that allow for fast, efficient, and scalable access. Many NoSQL data stores force one to think about how you're going to access the data more than SQL databases since the NoSQL stores usually don't support things like joins. One still has to do a lot of work to design to implement it right.