Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

From: Florian Weimer <fw(at)deneb(dot)enyo(dot)de>
To: "Marc G(dot) Fournier" <scrappy(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Cc: "Richard P(dot) Welty" <rwelty(at)averillpark(dot)net>, Reko Turja <reko(dot)turja(at)liukuma(dot)net>, pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and
Date: 2006-02-13 16:59:34
Message-ID: 87oe1btcsp.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de
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* Marc G. Fournier:

> "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

Nice spin indeed. The software in question was of questionable
legality in the first place. Without reading the actual court ruling,
we can't know if this was a factor in the ruling. Furthermore, it can
only affect distribution, not use (= running) of copies you already
have.

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