From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([69.77.167.62] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1JFIBL-0008MN-Lx for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:31 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4D910E0AC0; Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:59:59 +0000 (UTC) Received: from crowfix.com (crowfix.com [216.240.38.154]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 462D1E0ABB for ; Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:59:56 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 10563 invoked by uid 1000); 16 Jan 2008 23:59:49 -0000 Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:59:49 -0800 From: felix@crowfix.com To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo on the Sales block? Message-ID: <20080116235949.GA10313@crowfix.com> References: Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.16 (2007-06-09) X-Archives-Salt: 63694b1c-83be-4f04-8b79-71e00602f8c4 X-Archives-Hash: 889c1e685fd18861efadb492cdded7b4 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. -- ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933 I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list