Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and (IANAL)

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

>
> "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
>

Some cursory research into this indicates that it was a case where
software licenses were never an issue.  Indeed, Mattel as far as I can
see never acquired cphack.  There are also questions whether hte
software was validly released under the GPL.  However, the 1st Circuit
ruled that nonparties are not bound by the final injunction without
additional lawsuits.

Here is some more info:
http://cphack.robinlionheart.com/

>
> Not 100% certain how the FreeBSD folks intepreted this as 'legally
> revoked the entire distribution ..." though, I'm not too sure ...
>
The final injunction sort of read that way, but the first circuit
narrowed it because if a nonparty could not challenge it, they could not
be bound by it.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers