Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Brendan Conoboy]

On 07/10/2012 11:05 AM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 13:19:09 -0400, Seth Johnson wrote:
>
>> Copyright is automatic under Berne.
>
> Which only means that you don't need to apply for copyright at any
> government office.
>
> But copyright on _what_? What comprises a "copyright work"? Single words?
> Single lines of code? Trivial/obvious code fragments some other person who
> have added at some other point of time? Or more original work only?

That's a great question.

>> people who contribute code to a GPL'd project
>> (or any project) automatically have a copyright claim,
>
> And we still don't know what has been contributed, if at all. And what
> licensing terms were applied to the file the person contributed to. The
> project this thread refers to has used different licenses for a long time
> already.
>
> Hey Audacious developers, here's a patch for a missing "return 1;" in
> libaudcore, and now that you've seen my patch, if you merge that line
> of code, I claim my rights.

Yep, good example.  What is the threshold?  There is only 1 person who 
can answer that authoritatively: The judge who ends up presiding over 
the court case where it's formally asked.  Everything else is opinion. 
Some of it informed: attorneys, some of it educated guessing (devoted 
groklaw readers), some of it blindingly ignorant.  Wherever each member 
of devel at l.fpo falls on that spectrum, the odds are they shouldn't be 
giving legal advice because there's only 1 judge and none of us are they.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com