Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 20:05 +0200, 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?
> 
> > 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.

Can you stop the useless hyperbole ?

The reason why nobody is telling you a hard rule is that there are no
hard rules, but often it will be decided on case by case basis.

So when re-licensing you have to be paranoid but most importantly do it
with the support of a lawyer that knows how to minimize ill effects
should someone later decide you did something wrong.

That's all was really on the table I think, all people really *can* say
is that you cannot assume much about who can claims copyright until you
analyze the specific contribution. This is one reason why some people
insist in pretending you to surrender any copyright to the project owner
when you contribute code.

In general if you are doing things in good faith everything will work
fine in the end. Just don't try to be casual when addressing the matter
as it is not something to underestimate like you seem to be doing.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York