Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

jonah(dot)harris(at)gmail(dot)com ("Jonah H. Harris") writes:
> The GPL, while nice in its intent, sucks for businesses. 

It _doesn't_ suck if you are the business that owns the entirety of
the code. If you are *that* business, you have plenty O choices,
pointedly including:

- Selling under other licenses to make mucho dinero
- Selling all your rights to Oracle for a big bundle of money

Those factors definitely *don't* suck if you are the owner of the
code.

> This is especially true when companies like MySQL aren't responsible
> and base a majority of their product on a ton of IP they don't own. 
> Who gets screwed?  It's actually MySQL's customers.  MySQL could go
> out of business, oh well.  But the customers that wanted to ship an
> embedded MySQL now have to bow down to Oracle whether it's directly
> or indirectly.

Of course, the GPL evidently can "suck quite a bit" if you're a
customer, and don't have any ownership of the code...
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