Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Mon Jul 9 20:03:00 UTC 2012


On Mon, 9 Jul 2012 15:36:25 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> It's certainly possible for contributions to be so minor that they gain
> no copyright. 

I _do_ _not_ _know_ about what level of contributions we talk to. Whether
they have been one-line fixes of bugs or typos, dozens of lines, or even
entire files. With more than "minor" contributions, typically the
contributed work is credited/honoured appropriately, either by listing a
contributor as a project developer or with proper attributions in the
files or the documentation.

However, often one proposes a patch, and a developer doesn't _copy_ it
verbatim, but applies something similar.

I'm really not interested in legal pedantry that any contributor, who
managed to get a few lines of code copied by the project developers, might
return years later with an interest in defending copyright.

> But this determination can be complicated and fact
> specific. Certainly the dividing line is not one of updating the copyright
> headers.

Hence I pointed out that a general problem has been to keep track of who
contributed what and whether previous contributions are still found in the
code. If they are not found in the code anymore (or not substantial enough
anymore), there is nothing left for past copyright holders to claim.

-- 
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