If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of rights granted by the GPL.
Considering Oracle's two recent actions against open source projects, I'd suspect this is yet another move to minimize the amount of open source software under its control.
They're all Apache 2, which is about as permissively decoupled from the organization as it gets. Oracle could disappear tomorrow, delete all the repos, or begin charging $5,000/seat for this software, and nothing would happen. You could, literally, fork all three, rename them, and run off on your own projects and have a merry 'ole time.
In fact, everyone going after Oracle in this thread should do exactly that right now.
Maybe we should change the standard licences - GPL, MIT, etc. - to include a caveat "free to use without restriction... except by companies known as, or ever known as, Oracle Corporation"...
Except Oracle is not the danger here: the license incompatibility is about GPL, not CDDL. I don’t think Oracle is going to sue anyone for GPL violation. And if it does, it could do that without CDDL in the picture.
This article somehow implies a moral obligation on Oracle's behalf to either modify their licence or code to be gpl compliant. I sincerely hope they don't as the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences.
I doubt that it's going to happen. People working with Oracle are generally not the kind that would start Open Source projects. If they are, also generally, they won't work with Oracle for long.
If it becomes a problem it will be too late to not pay Oracle huge fees/fines for using it against the license. Oracle is known for their license enforcement, it might even bankrupt your company.
I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot-pole without an explicit patent grant. Oracle has misbehaved too much in the past (and present) to ever be trusted again by the open source community in my opinion.
Imagine all GPL software required the licensee to never enforce API copyright, and if they ever enforced API copyright (over unrelated code), their license to the GPL code was null and void. Then Oracle can't run Linux.
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