Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

* 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.