Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 9 Jul 2012 14:17:09 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> For a point of accuracy—

Or not. ;-)
 
> On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> This is a bogus theory of law here.  No Berne signatory nation may
> require any notice or registration to enjoy the protection of copyright.

Is that what was claimed? - No. Copyright Law can be more difficult if
copyright notices are missing or if a different copyright holder is
explicitly listed while (sporadic?) contributors are not.

In this case, it's source code files [mostly] written [and maintained] by
somebody else, with a preamble [and copyright notice] such as

  | file.c
  | Copyright 2011 Some Other Person's Name
  |
  | This file is part of Audacious.
  |
  | Licensing terms […]

and arbitrary other people, who get their patch contributions merged,
don't gain any copyright protection on the file or the proper parts of it,
and the lack of attribution in the copyright notice makes it very easy
to forget/ignore/disregard who may have committed a substantial part of
the file.
 
> That someone's name wasn't listed in the right places may _explain_ their
> non-inclusion in a copyright change discussion, but it doesn't make it
> justifiable
> or lawful.
> 
> Perhaps his contributions were too insignificant to earn copyright
> coverage, or at least too insignificant to make blockading a licensing
> change by the other developers an ethical move, or perhaps they were
> all removed as part of the process or through code churn,  but none of that
> has much to do with where an author's name is listed.

Which is just different words for what I've written earlier, isn't it?