On 2/9/2011 6:31 PM, plinehan wrote:

>
> Helen Borrie<helebor@...> wrote:
>
>> Inprise (as they were then) made the beta InterBase 6.0
>> open source.
>
>
> With a view to launching the Open Sourced company
> in the light of the Internet bubble which was
> fast approaching its zenith? VA Linux IPO'd and
> went through the roof.

Actually, the Internet bubble collapsed in April - and the
open source movement continued until August 1. There's lots
of history there, all of it bad.

>
>
> My question is really, if they open sourced and then
> closed it again, do they have any rights over
> improvements made by Firebird developers under
> the terms of the IPL (curren licence?) or of
> the Initial Developer's PUBLIC LICENSE Version 1?

Not unless they comply with the terms of the license, which
is that they make their changes public if they distribute
them outside their organization. On the other hand, since
their code is closed, who's to know?

>
>
>> Inprise started an open source project themselves on
>> Sourceforge. It was a read-only tree. It lasted for
>> about a year and just simply disappeared.
>
>
> Yes, but did they "take back" the code or what?

There's an interesting similarity between Firebird bug fixes
and extensions and changes to InterBase, but they also did
a number of other changes.

>
>
> I should have expressed myself bette - do Embarcadero
> have any right to use in their closed source Interbase
> product, code contributed by Firebird developers?

Arguably, they may have rights to changes made to old modules,
those licensed under IPL. They own the copyright to that code,
and its possible that "contributions" to that code remain under
their copyright. On the other hand, MySQL and even more so SUN
had serious agreements with all contributors explicitly assigning
the copyright to all changes back to the company. So, those
companies did not assume that they had automatic rights to changes
to their copyrighted code.

Certainly they have no special rights to new code licensed under
IDPL. On the other hand, see above - nobody knows what's in
closed code.

>
>
> OK, then, maybe my question can be rephrased as "Would
> Embarcadero be complying with the licence were they to
> put a Firebird feature into Interbase"?

Probably not, but its in the interest of the Firebird project
to keep InterBase and Firebird as similar as possible. And
to fix bugs in both. InterBase's reputation reflects on
Firebird.

cheers,

Ann