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What does Oracle actually own? Isn't the code committed by all the community members their own property, in other words isn't the code base "contaminated" from

by Maro 16y ago

What does Oracle actually own? Isn't the code committed by all the community members their own property, in other words isn't the code base "contaminated" from the point of view of Oracle?

logophobia 16y ago
The fork will be contaminated. But for openoffice, Sun (and now Oracle) demanded copyright assignment for all contributions.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  As long as the Oracle parts are distributed under the GPL, Oracle can scream all they want and accomplish nothing. GPL shields you from their legal dept.
vladd 16y ago
GPL doesn't apply to trademarks, which are still the property of the company (Sun/now Oracle), just like Firefox is a trademark owned by Mozilla Foundation. You can fork the code and make your own brand with it, but unless you offer something different, good luck in trying to get JohnDoe to install, say, MariaDB instead of MySQL or YourOffice instead of OpenOffice.
- Maro 16y ago
  It's funny that the examples you provided, although they look like foo, are actual forks. MariaDB was initiated by the original Mysql author, too.
  - cmelbye 16y ago
    I think he realizes that.
    - Maro 16y ago
      I know, but others might not, so I pointed it out. For example I didn't know about YourOffice and it certainly sounded like foo, I had to look it up.
jeroen 16y ago
Oracle owns all the openoffice.org code. See copyright assignment: http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-licensing.html#usinglicenses http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-licensing.html#usinglicen...