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

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 02:00:13PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> > 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?
>
> AFAIK it's not possible to revoke privileges already granted. The
> reason that Oracle's moves are potentially serious is that there is a
> fairly small developer base for the bits of software in question, and
> they could effectively lock up the knowledge needed to do anything
> useful (eg, by enforcing noncompete agreements that probably already
> exist for the employees of the companies they're buying). Thus,
> even though the user communities of these packages have the legal right
> to maintain a GPL-license fork, they might be years away from having
> the technical competence to do anything very useful with them. (Look
> at how long it took us to get far with the PG codebase after Berkeley
> handed it over.) Plus there's the problem of re-coalescing the
> community around a new core team that doesn't exist ...
>
> regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
> choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
> match
>

Not just non-compete agreements, but purchasing of employees with
the knowledge base is how it works. That is what Informix did with
Illustra--it bought the engineers. Sleepycat people are probably
tied up with golden handcuffs--corporate kink ;)

--elein
elein(at)varlena(dot)com