Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo on the Sales block?

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 11:47:04PM +0000, James wrote:
>
> I only ask because Sun just paid
> a billion dollars for MySQL....

Sun paid a billion dollars for the COMPANY which owns the copyright to
MySQL.  Someone controls Gentoo, be it the foundation (which may or
may not actually exist at the moment) or who knows who.  If those
people, or the foundation, want to "sell" Gentoo, I reckon they could,
but they would get only the name and a few servers.  No doubt everyone
else would merely fork the GPL'd sources and keep on going.

MySQL is also GPL, but most of the development is paid for by the
for-profit company which Sun just bought, so a fork is unlikely.

> How is it that Open Source is for sale?

Open Source is not for sale and was not sold, neither is GPL'd Free
Software.  Someone could no doubt buy some FLOSS copyrights from the
owners, but the GPL'd versions would still be out there and not for
sale; someone who wanted to "buy" already released sources would have
to buy up every public copy and every copy ever downloaded, and sign
the "sellers" (if they can even be called that) to promise to wipe
their drives.  They would, literally, have to buy every copy on the
planet, whether on current computers, backups, books, it would not
matter.

You need to read the GPL, the BSD license, the Perl Artistic license,
etc, and stop panicing.  Once released, FLOSS cannot be recalled.  The
copyrights can be bought, but the previously released versions are
still out there under their FLOSS license and could only be recalled
by that massive buyback I described, which could charitably be called
less realistic than a snowball fight in Hell.

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