On Thursday 07 September 2006 10:56 am, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On 06-Sep-06, at 8:24 PM, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
Huh ? I am guilty of not having read the GPL in full (too much legal language). And now you have me worried.
So that will mean that after the GPL is revoked, you can not use the software ?
yes - you cannot
You can challenge the revocation in court and are almost guranteed to win the challenge.
Does the licensor have to inform each user separately or is the user expected to keep track of it.
yes
What happens to any further distribution on it ?
same thing applies
In current context, say MySQL decides to revoke the GPL. Can they do it ? What happens to all the software that are now designed to run on MySQL as it is under GPL ? (there was a real danger of this happening, as I know Oracle is making overtues and offering large sums of money to buy the company)
see - if i write software, license it under gpl and release it, you build a business around it. I revoke the license and say 'pay me or stop using the software'. You have to comply. If you dont i sue you and will win.
You are guranteed to lose. Revocation as opposed to relicencing a new release has to be based on sound principle, like the licencee violating the terms of the licence( and in fact that would be the only ground). At best you could prevent further distribution as opposed to stopping usage. Also the recipient, who has acted in good faith, and invested substantial resources based on your original licenece will be entitled to compensation even if u do manage to revoke the licence.
So can linus do it? Theoretically yes, but he owns only a small fraction of the copyright and will have to get the consent of thousands of others before he can revoke. So in practice he cannot. But Mysql owns every bit of the copyright - so it can revoke. That is because Mysql does not accept patches unless the copyright of the patch is handed over to it. The idea of the GPL is to *subvert* copyright so that noone in practice has copyright over the work. But that only works if a sufficient number of people contribute code to the work.
That is why i use postgres. One has to be a very doubting thomas when some acts of the author seem fishy. In the case of MySQL there havebeen several such statements by it's directors which would cause me to be seriously worried. Same goes for some of the commercial distros and closed drivers.