Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:30:50 -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:

> On 07/09/2012 03:21 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >> 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,
> > I don't think this is true.
> 
> Agreed. It is my opinion that this is not the case, assuming that the
> changes are substantial enough to be copyrightable.

And if your assumption is wrong?

What if the main creators of the software prefer acknowledging substantial
contributions with proper attribution and copyright notice in the file
preambles? They do list different names in different files, and there are
only few authors who do most of the development. They've kept a separate list
of patch authors, but many patches may not be considered "substantial
enough" to put a submitter onto that list. In my first reply in this thread
I've pointed out that Petr is not credited for patches.

> I'm otherwise refraining from comment on this thread, because it is
> unclear as to whether translations are copyrightable or not.

As with many ordinary patches, once you've seen the solution (here "the
translation"), it would be more difficult to do it differently ("to translate
it differently").
As with many patches (they might be straight-forward even), it's like
first-come-first-served for a translator to be the first one to do the
work. Perhaps nobody else would have volunteered to do the translation,
but who knows? Anybody else might have come up with the same or very
similar translation. Same for authors of patches, especially those of
trivial ones (not limited to bug-fixes where a developer likely would
have come up with exactly the same or a very similar code change).

Going in circles if we extend it to substantial enough contributions
and the contributor not reminding the main developers to give credits.

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