Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other shoe"

On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 12:54, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Stephen Frost wrote:
>
> > * Marc G. Fournier (scrappy(at)postgresql(dot)org) wrote:
> >> As of this moment, if Oracle buys Zend, they could effectively kill PHP
> >> ... the core engine that PHP is built around is a Zend engine, so if they
> >> were to revoke the license for that, PHP would be dead ... kinda like
> >> MySQL with InnoDB ... now, there was talk at one point time with
> >> replacying that engine with Parrot, so I'm not sure how hard/long it would
> >> take for them to do so if Zend got pulled out from under them ...
> >
> > Has there been any actual test (ie: court case) of a piece of software
> > being released under an open source (BSD, GPL, whatever) license and
> > then the licensor revoking that and stopping everyone from distributing
> > the code? Personally, I have no idea at all if this is something which
> > can be done and upheld or not and I'm kind of curious about it. That
> > would be a very different (and much more difficult for the rest of us)
> > situation from releasing future versions as closed-source only or just
> > not releasing new versions.
>
> Actually, based on my limited understanding ... "currently existing
> versions" of PHP would be safe, it would be new versions that would have
> to rip out the Zend stuff ... I don't believe you can retroactively change
> a license, but IANAL ...

Nope. The ZEND license reads pretty much like a BSD license. "You got
it, it's yours, feel free to do what you want with it, as long as you
acknowledge you got it from us."

So, new versions of PHP could certainly be built on top of Zend, and if
someone found a bug in Zend, then they could fix it and release that
improved version. As long as they followed the license given to them.

Again, the MySQL thing is very different from most other situations, and
it's different BECAUSE MySQL AB plays the dual license game but they
don't own all the code they dual license.