Stephen Frost <sfrost@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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
