[conspire] Licensing boogy man paranoia

[Adrien Lamothe]

For some strange reason, upon awaking this morning I had the thought that Oracle purchased Sun mainly to get their hands on MySQL. After all, Oracle purchased both Inno Oy and Sleepycat Software shortly before the Sun acquisition, effectively cornering MySQL. So now I just notice several articles touting box.net, including an interview with Mark Andreessen, who proclaims "the clock is ticking on Oracle" (http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9). Of course, Mark is invested in box.net. So I'm thinking there is a chance the good folks at MySQL filed some patents on parts of the product, which Oracle can use to go after people like they are doing against Android/Google with their Java patents. Another interesting question is if Oracle files patents on parts of MySQL, whether they can then go after people who were using the product before the fact. Seems like that shouldn't be allowed, but as a friend once pointed out the legal system is like a heavy
 weight boxing match where the champion should always win but every now and then the challenger gets in a lucky punch and KOs him.
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