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by binaryfinery 5680 days ago
>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 to everyone.
2 comments
gxti 5680 days ago
"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.

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binaryfinery 5680 days ago
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.

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djcapelis 5680 days ago
Is that revocable though? Usually grants that are irrevocable will say so...
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binaryfinery 5679 days ago
"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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