On Fri, 2 Jan 2009 10:08:28 -0700, Mark Post <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> On 1/2/2009 at 7:44 AM, "Chase, John" <[email protected]> wrote: >-snip- >> But zcobol is touted as "open source". If it is "licensed" in the way >> Linux is "licensed", then IBM couldn't buy it any more than they can buy >> Linux. > >Probably not true, assuming the two developers are the only ones who have contributed to the package, and they agree on selling the rights to it. If other people have contributed, their permission would also be necessary. Obviously as the number of contributors goes up, the likelihood of getting everyone's permission becomes rather dim, which is the case of the Linux kernel. The examples of where such a sale has happened are quite numerous: JBoss, BerkelyDB, MySQL, InnoDB and so on. > > >Mark Post True. However, anything that is GPL'ed can be "forked". IBM could buy zcobol from the owners. They could then then add proprietary extentions to it and sell it without source code. However, the original zcobol would still be available for others to fork on their own. IOW, IBM could not come to people using the GPL version of zcobol and say "either pay us for this version or stop using it immediately!" IOW - once a particular version of the code is GPL'ed, then that version is forever GPL'ed. With the permission of the copyright holders an alternate version can be made which is not GPL'ed. IIRC, this sort of thing is what is going on with MySQL. There is still the GPL version in addition to the SUN version. Same with OpenOffice versus StarOffice. -- John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
