The Software Freedom Law Show

Episode 0x1C: Sun, Oracle and the European Union

8 December 2009

Download

oggmp3

Summary

Karen and Bradley discuss Eben Moglen's letter to the European Commission regarding the Oracle acquisition of Sun.

This show was released on Tuesday 8 December 2009; its running time is 00:44:03.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:30)

• Karen talked about Sun's 2009-11-09 8K SEC filing that broke the story about the European Commission raising questions about the Sun/Oracle merger.(02:15)
• Karen and Bradley talked about Eben Moglen's personal comments to the European Commission regarding the Oracle/Sun merger. (05:21)
• Bradley mentioned that Sun's original product, SunOS, was based on BSD. (06:30)
• Bradley mentioned the Sun acquisition of MySQL AB. (07:10)
Bradley referred to a previous Software Freedom Law Show where he and Karen discussed “Open Core” business models and centralized copyright. (09:16)
• Karen mentioned that Eben has also formally requested to appear as independent expert before the European Commission on this matter. (11:09)
• Bradley criticized Oracle for their predatory proprietary licensing business practices, and has tried to stop people from using Free Software. (13:00)
• Karen mentioned that we have talked about the dual licensing/proprietary relicensing confusion discussed on a previous show. (15:29)
• Bradley pointed out that RMS coined the term “barely legitimate” for proprietary relicensing. (17:09)
• Bradley referred to his blog post about how “Open Core” is problematic for advancing Free Software. (17:44)
• Bradley thinks the proprietary relicensing business model that Michael Widenius supports is on that has run its course and probably should not be used anymore (20:54)

Segment 1 (22:16)

• Bradley said that if it were up to him, all published and deployed software in the world would be Free Software, and he wishes that the European Commission would require that for the merger to go through, but it's not their mandate to do such things. (23:50)
• Bradley said if he could make a wish, that he'd wish the European Commission would put the MySQL code base into a non-profit entity chartered to never make MySQL proprietary, and to release it under GPLv3-or-later. (25:45)
• Bradley pointed out that it might be good if before that, Oracle releases MySQL under GPLv3 to get the extra patent assurances, although Karen points out Eben's letter raises the issue that there is an implicit patent assurance from the GPLv2 release of MySQL already. (26:01)
• Bradley talked briefly off-topic about the file, Double Indemnity. (26:30)
• Bradley mentions Oracle's ownership of MySQL copyrights is dangerous because Oracle's goal is to take away software freedom from the world with regard to databases, by trying to get all users to switch to proprietary databases, and that they are likely to use the MySQL codebase toward this horrible mission. (29:40)
• Bradley pointed out that any organization that isn't committing to releasing all its software as Free Software is a dangerous place for centralized copyright of a FLOSS codebase. (32:04)
• Karen is skeptical about for-profit corporate control of Free Software because they will always focus on shareholder value over software freedom principles. (36:08)
• Bradley tries not to start sentences with Look, but does so accidentally sometimes. (36:53)
• Bradley pointed out that he believes the software freedom world would be better off if Oracle had not ported their proprietary databases to GNU/Linux. (38:00)
• Bradley and Karen mentioned that the one year anniversary on 2009-11-11. (41:31)
• Bradley mentioned Bashpodder and gpodder (42:00)

---

Send feedback and comments on the oggcast to <oggcast@softwarefreedom.org>. You can keep in touch with the SFLC on our IRC channel, #sflc on irc.freenode.net, and by following SFLC on identi.ca.

Tags: bkuhn, karen, anti-trust, for-profit, gpl, Oracle, Sun, Europe

Other Software Freedom Law Show podcasts...