Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other shoe"

* Marc G. Fournier (scrappy@postgresql.org) wrote:
> As of this moment, if Oracle buys Zend, they could effectively kill PHP
> ... the core engine that PHP is built around is a Zend engine, so if they
> were to revoke the license for that, PHP would be dead ... kinda like
> MySQL with InnoDB ... now, there was talk at one point time with
> replacying that engine with Parrot, so I'm not sure how hard/long it would
> take for them to do so if Zend got pulled out from under them ...

Has there been any actual test (ie: court case) of a piece of software
being released under an open source (BSD, GPL, whatever) license and
then the licensor revoking that and stopping everyone from distributing
the code?  Personally, I have no idea at all if this is something which
can be done and upheld or not and I'm kind of curious about it.  That
would be a very different (and much more difficult for the rest of us)
situation from releasing future versions as closed-source only or just
not releasing new versions.

    Thanks,

        Stephen