Surely if you're confident saying that the MySQL client library surely
has alternatives, you must have an example, no? Personally I find the
assertion somewhat surprising, since there is no market nor "itch" for
a third-party MySQL client library that I know of.
What you're saying doesn't make sense. There are a ton of independent,
third-party libraries for every *other* common type of networking
function, language, transport, protocol, or what-have-you. And there's
market forces to consider. Clearly there's demand for a client library
license-compatible with closed-source development. The marginal cost
of such a thing is obviously zero. The price MySQL charges for such a
library is considerably greater. SQL itself is not proprietary; not
patented/secret/whatever. Ergo, someone will and probably someone has
undercut MySQL's price for this particular good. That I don't know of
a specific example is immaterial; it is easy to demonstrate its
probable existence by simple reasoning.
The same reasoning that says that if mints cost 10 cents to make and
some store is selling brand-name ones for a buck a pop, and nothing in
the nature of a "mint" is secret or patented or anything, then
somewhere you will likely find someone selling mints for fifty cents,
or a quarter, or even just fifteen cents. (I'd look to see if the very
same store carried no-name mints at half the price, before even
looking in other stores.)
While SQL the language is indeed a standard, there is no standard for
wire represntations of either queries or result sets
That's very odd. If there isn't, there certainly should be. That's as
if they'd standardized HTML without bothering to standardize HTTP.
Nevertheless, whatever protocol MySQL server uses is surely easy to
reverse engineer without "infecting" whatever you're developing with
the GPL, using the standard clean-room reverse engineering method used
to avoid copyright infringement when developing interoperable software
more generally.
