On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 02:00:13PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > 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 > > ---------------------------(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@xxxxxxxxxxx
