I was under the impression that the main reason to choose GPL was that you (the developer) believed in having your code under that licence. If you choose to cha

I was under the impression that the main reason to choose GPL was that you (the developer) believed in having your code under that licence. If you choose to change that position, that should be entirely up to you. The reason that this is now an issue is because the original author chose to sell / pass on the software, including rights to sun to do with as they liked. And they sold to Oracle. And Oracle may choose to release MySQL under a different licence, which they as the owner are able to do. All this means that new versions of MySQL released by Oracle may or may not be available under GPL. I believe they can't make this apply to previous versions, but I am not a lawyer. Other people are free to take older versions and improve on them and release them under GPL, so this may end up being a community-driven fork of MySQL. So the GPL serves its purpose in a round-about way anyway. So the whole argument is a moot issue (in my books) anyway. Storm in a teacup even... unless Oracle chooses to non-GPL MySQL...