Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Petr Pisar]

On 2012-07-09, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

Obviously not. I just remember some patches into plugins and they have
been removed probably.

> 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.
>
I understand the practical point of view, but I cannot agree from the
point of view of law. This aspect has been already discussed and I'm not
going to dispute it more.

> 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.

Because the translation is derived work of message template (*.pot
file) which is itself compilation over all source files, each getting
its own 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.
>
Yes, but the question here are the translators rights which are, at
least in my case, declared clearly in the header of cs/po.cs and also
visible in git log of the project:

# Petr Písař <petr.pisar at atlas.cz>, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012.

I believe five years of creative work is significant portion of the deal
to bother project leader to ask translators for permission to change the
license terms.

In spot of the declaration of another contributor in this threat I think
Audacious upstream tracked the C code authors but ommited the translators.

(Actually I do not wonder. In recent past, it was difficult to get my
updates to upstream, the developers were ignoring my bug reports about
out-dated po/POTFILES.in which got the whole project translation effort
into deep limb. Audacious developers got tired of the
internationalization probably, and they moved the translations to
Lunchpad which effectively killed my interrest in translating this
project any more. Changing the license to BSD while overlooking
translators just confirms their ingorance in this field.)

> 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
>
Thanks for the link. I will give them few sentences.

-- Petr