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

* Marc G. Fournier (scrappy(at)postgresql(dot)org) wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >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 ...

Well, if you can't retroactively change a license then couldn't the
existing version of Zend also be used going forward...? It wouldn't
need to be ripped out... (Perhaps I'm missing something here but I'm
guessing the Zend stuff is under an open source license atm too...).

Thanks,

Stephen