Re: Supporting non-free SQL clients in ob-sql (was: [PATCH] ob-sql: Add support for Athena)

[Tim Cross]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> writes:

> Daniel Kraus <daniel@kraus.my> writes:
>
>> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I think you run a high risk of running into GNU policy issues wrt
>>> licensing and free software support given this is a cleint for an AWS
>>> only database.
>>
>> Is it because it's cloud only or because it's proprietary?
>
> Both. For cloud, see
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
> (we can have cloud service support, but only those that are not unjust)
>
>> Because we already support Orcale, SAP Hana, MSSql and Vertico for example.
>
> We probably should not.
> Ideally, we need universal SQL cli support and then move all non-free
> clients to external packages.

Well, we don't really support those other databases in the same sense as
is bieng proposed here for this AWS db. Those other databases are only
supported in the sense that you can tell sql mode you are using one of
them and you can add the necessary configuration parameters to make a
connnection, but that is it. We don't, for example, provide the Oracle
client in order to use the oracle database. The user has to install the
Oracle client separately.

So, you could likely modify sql-mode to support the ability to pass
necessary parameters to a client which can connect to the AWS database,
but you cannot bundle the client (in this case, the python code you
referenced).

The fact this is also a cloud based database does make the situation
worse as the official FSF and GNU position is that cloud based services
represent a reduction in user freedom because they do not control those
services and cannot see the soruce code - essentially, use of those
services makes you dependent on and to some extent beholding to (in this
case) Amazon. With the other non-free databases, such as Oracle, you can
at least install the database on your own hardware.