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.
it is only 10 sections and not much legal language - do read it
GPL can be revoked ? Under what circumstances can it be revoked ?
any time the copyright holder feels like
So that will mean that after the GPL is revoked, you can not use the software ?
yes - you cannot
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. 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.