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copied!<p>Do not make business decisions based on legal advice you get on the internet -- including mine.</p> <p>My understanding is that if you tell your customer that they are responsible for downloading and installing MySQL and the JDBC connector, you can get around the GPL license terms.</p> <p>If you distribute GPL software with your application, your software implicitly uses that license too. You would be obligated to allow your customer access to your source code. including the rights to modify it and distribute it themselves.</p> <p>You could choose as your default RDBMS another popular open-source RDBMS with a more permissive license, such as:</p> <ul> <li>PostgreSQL (BSD license)</li> <li>SQLite (public domain)</li> <li>Firebird (InterBase Public License, based on the Mozilla Public License)</li> </ul> <hr> <p>Re your question in comment: Confluence is actually not open source, it's a commercial product. They do make source available to commercial license holders, but this doesn't qualify as open-source per the OSI definition.</p> <p>Confluence uses JDBC, a non-RDBMS-specific API defined by Sun Microsystems. Confluence distributes with a lightweight Java database called HSQL or HypersonicHSQL, which uses a license like the New BSD License. If the customer wants to use Confluence with MySQL he has to install it himself.</p> <p>See <a href="http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Database+Setup+For+MySQL" rel="noreferrer">http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Database+Setup+For+MySQL</a> where the setup documentation tells you to go download and install MySQL and MySQL Connector/J.</p> <p>The key to why this works for a non-open-source product like Confluence is that their product doesn't <em>necessarily</em> need to use MySQL, it can use a different JDBC driver (and in fact does so, by default). Since there's no dependency on using MySQL specifically, Confluence doesn't need to comply with the terms of GPL.</p> <p>If you have other questions about GPL, the GPL FAQ is probably the best place for you to start, instead of StackOverflow. See <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html</a></p>

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