Ok. I have a question, I can't seem to find the answer specificially, but as it applies to the GPL (aka viral w**k) in general, somebody here might be able to answer.

I have added a feature to our software which allows datasheets to be looked up with a keypress, this is done by storing an "attribute" which contains an id for the datasheet, i.e "MCP23016" or "AT91SAM7S", this value is looked up in a database and the filename is retrieved. As customers have their own structures and naming conventions for datasheets, we decided this was the best method - we're not forcing a particular naming convention or structure on them.

To accomplish this, I'm just supplying a simple dll which has a function which takes the value of the datasheet to look up and the "root datasheet folder" path, filenames in the database are stored relative to this location, so the dll concatenates the two names and then launches the file.

Now, internally to our organisation I have the dll so that it uses a mysql database on one of our machines here, but I can't distribute this plugin because it would require us to buy a MySQL license for every copy of our software sold, overkill for a simple small feature like this.

So for general users I'm going to supply a version of the dll which uses a simple tab delimited file ("attribute" \ t"filename"), one "database entry" per line, obviously this is pretty nasty, but it's simple and it'll works, maybe very slowly though!

We are going to supply the source code for this simple dll so that if our customers want to make use of a proper database system they can modify and do that.

Now....

What if I were to supply ONLY (in addition to the other simple dll) the source code to the MySQL version, no binary, no mysql files, just my source code which calls the client library, what is the licensing issue here? I'm not supplying any MySQL code in any form whatsoever, only calls to their database client library (which i've not supplied). Our end users would need to download MySQL themselves (and the developer libraries) and Visual Studio Express and set it all up and compile the dll themselves.

Is this in violation of the GPL or the MySQL license?

Thanks.

Adrian