Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 9 Jul 2012 13:10:48 +0000 (UTC), Petr Pisar wrote:

> > As of 3.3-beta1, Audacious is now officially under a two-clause BSD
> > license (previously GPLv3). Some plugins (separate package) are still
> > under other licenses, however.
> 
> How could they have changed the license without asking contributors?
> I have periodically translated the messages, I believe I have some patches
> there and nobody had asked me.

Have you had your name and a copyright statement in any source file?
To highlight that you've been the [primary] author of that file? If not,
you're not a full/official author to have a stake in the licensing
decision.

There have been major changes to the source code all the time, including
new preambles for heavily rewritten files. From what I can see it's been
very difficult to keep track of who had created what portions of the code,
and hardly any inherited code (from BMP, XMMS and friends) is left either.
The file src/audacious/credits.c has been more up-to-date than the aging
file "AUTHORS", too, and neither one was accurate enough to tell who of the
"Patch authors" contributed what and whether the contributed code is still
included and whether a core developer would have contributed the same code
if an external patch contributor had not done it.

You're not listed as a patch author in Audacious 3.2.4 (in the "Credits",
from the credits.c file that is gone in the latest release).

I see your name in the cs.po file's list of translators. The header says
"This file is distributed under the same license as the Audacious
package." Same for the plugins' translations, but those have never applied
a single license. Each plugin applies an individual license. As with source
code and no accurate attribution, one would need to figure out who of the
multiple translators contributed what portions of the translation. Not really
feasible, IMO.

If you think you've got a stake in the licensing decision, you would
need to talk to the core developers.

My request for a "License clarification" can be found in the new bug
tracker: http://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/issues/46

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