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

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