Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
yes - difficult to "buy" an open source project. The code is out there  |
No, it is not. Kovid owns the code, and he can sell that ownership. The CUPS package was bought and is now owned by Apple. Berkeley DB is owned by Oracle. Both are available as GPL-ed code.
When an open source package is bought, the community has the right, granted under the GPL, to fork the code, and that is, precisely, what happened when OpenOffice was purchased. The fork is LibreOffice.
The code is released under the GPL affects everyone
except the owner, who is free to strip GPL from the source, create derivative works and sell them as proprietary binaries.