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Oracle in conflict with another open source project?

hudson-labs.org

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Re: Oracle in conflict with another open source project?

#31

Post by gxti »

binaryfinery wrote: post #11

>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, >package hudson; You might own the trademark Oracle, but you just licensed the use of it…

"copies of the Software"

Doesn't say anything about the name. Trademark law and copyright law are related but very distinct. If Oracle owns and enforces the trademark "Hudson" in the context of continuous integration software, and they say "Stop using the name Hudson", you must comply regardless of any copyright licensing in effect.

Compare Firefox which has a free software license but prohibits use of the Firefox name if any modifications are made to the code. This is why it's called Iceweasel on Debian -- as I understand it, even a security patch is technically enough to violate the contract.

Re: Oracle in conflict with another open source project?

#32

Post by binaryfinery »

gxti wrote: post #31
binaryfinery wrote: post #11

>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, >package hudson; You might own the trademark Oracle, but you just licensed the use of it…

"copies of the Software" Doesn't say anything about the name. Trademark law and copyright law are related but very distinct. If Oracle owns and enforces the trademark "Hudson" in the context of continuous integration software, and they say "Stop using the name Hudson", you must comply regardless of any copyright licensing in effect. Compare Firefox which has a free software license but prohibits use of the Firefox na…

On the contrary: the software is called "hudson", and the license explicitly grants the right to deal in the software without restriction. Those rights include the rights to distribute and publish, but "including" doesnt mean "only". In any case, how would one publish this software without using the name "hudson"? Does this license imply that prior to publishing the software we have to replace every instane of the letters h u d s o n with something else? That would not be "without restriction".

There are several licenses written that say "you may not use our name to promote your version of the software" or something like that. MIT is not one of them.

Oracle is welcome to fork it and give it a tougher license. Dont expect it will see many commits after that tho.

Re: Oracle in conflict with another open source project?

#33

Post by bborud »

Fork it and rename it.

Hudson is too important to me, and lots of other developers, to be subject to the whims of Oracle executives. If ever there was a case where forking is the most obvious answer, this is it.

As for people who have built a business out of Hudson: "Hudson" is only a name and if Oracle wants the name, let them have it.

If you rename it I'll do my part in helping with the marketing of the new name by spreading the word among my peers and I suspect most other Hudson users would do the same.

Re: Oracle in conflict with another open source project?

#34

Post by binaryfinery »

djcapelis wrote: post #29
binaryfinery wrote: post #11

>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, >package hudson; You might own the trademark Oracle, but you just licensed the use of it…

Is that revocable though? Usually grants that are irrevocable will say so...

"Without restriction". Not that that matters. If a license doesnt have a term, then its irrevocable. Oracle can always change the license for future releases.

You must bear in mind that this is open source. Oracle does not own this. It doesn't appear to be aware of this.

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