Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

On Sun, 12 Feb 2006, Richard P. Welty wrote:

>
> On Feb 12, 2006, at 9:09 PM, Reko Turja wrote:
>
>>> I'm using Sleepycat's copyleft licensing
>>> option, and nobody can take that copy away from me. Your mail servers
>>> are probably similar: the copyleft license you already have is good
>>> enough.
>
>> It think the GNU licensing has already been once revoked from bottom up in
>> US court of law and that might be used as preliminary case if Oracle wants
>> to press the issue. BSD-licensing is harder to hit that way, but GPL
>> believability in OSS might be hit hard.
>
> i've not heard this before about GPL and find it a little hard to
> believe that something of this importance could happen without
> becoming common knowledge. i'm not a huge fan of the GPL, but this
> sounds somewhat fudish as presented.

"The GPL explicitly disallows revoking the license. It has occurred ,
however, that a company (Mattel) purchased a GPL copyright (cphack),
revoked the entire copyright, went to court, and prevailed [2]. That is,
they legally revoked the entire distribution and all derivative works
based on the copyright. Whether this could happen with a larger and more
dispersed distribution is an open question; there is also some confusion
regarding whether the software was really under the GPL."
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/license-cannot.html

Here is something about it, but nothing about Mattel getting it revoked:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35226,00.html

And the [2] link above points to:

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/28/cyberpatrol.mirrors/

Not 100% certain how the FreeBSD folks intepreted this as 'legally revoked
the entire distribution ..." though, I'm not too sure ...

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664