A.2. Aaron did not agree with my presumption that Koha is currently in part a derived work of MySQL. He used arguments about separate processes of Koha and MySQL. He was somewhat dismissive of MySQL specific calls in Koha which do not incorporate MySQL source code or change the functionality of MySQL at a low level in C or C++.
I thought that some of Aaron's suggested analysis of distinguishing Koha as a separate work from MySQL with no derivative work relationship was mistaken. Whether a separate process is spawned was unconvincing as an argument and did not account for programs which are accepted as a single program and spawn multiple processes. Express dependency on MySQL seemed sufficient to me to establish a derivative work relationship.
Even if my presumption might be correct, Aaron seemed fairly confident that there would never be a problem from Oracle over Koha using GPL 3 or AGPL 3 as a license violation of GPL 2. Perhaps more importantly, he considered the possibility that some other party might make a similar claim against Koha as fanciful.
Thomas, I have to agree with Aaron here. You are confusing Koha's use of mysql-specific *query language* with the customization of the mysql server/client source code. This would be akin to thinking that including browser-specific javascript produces a derivative work of that browser. The OSS Exception you linked relates to client driver libraries. In our case, something like DBD::mysql may be a driver library. Koha as a whole is not. We don't distribute mysql source code and we do not build a custom mysql client. I see absolutely zero legitimate basis for considering Koha a derivative work of msyql, just the same as it is not a derivative work of Apache. Our application is *dependent* on those projects, but not derivative of them. I don't think we need to be concerned about whether mysql is licensed GPL 2 or GPL>=2 (or BSD or whatever). All we need to care about is that their licensing remains "open enough" for us to continue including a dependency on their software. Lars is correct that we only need to worry about the source that is in Koha when making a license decision. --Joe Atzberger