Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes. And also told Oracle that it was very limited what they could
> claim as damage caused by the copyright infringement over those 9
> lines.

Very limited in the context of billion dollar lawsuits.
Statutory infringement for commercial use makes any infringement a
potentially non-trivial
at the level of mere mortals. Besides, the damages are generally irrelevant the
FUD and disruption are the real costs.  The only litigation that ends
up in front
of a judge are where one or both parties is either crazy or a fool.
Everyone else
settles.

But this is a silly discussion. There is substantial jurisdictional
differences on the
bar of copyrightability, and because there are basically no useful bright lines
the details are basically not worth discussing.

The point is that being cautious and conservative is a very good
policy and about the
only one which can be sanely advocated.  If someone's contributions are
really insignificant then it's no big deal to replace them if they're
being unfriendly
and are unwilling to go along with a re-licensing. It may be a bit of a pain,
but it's much less of a pain than.. this discussion not to mention the pain
of a potential legal dispute.

And no, re-licensing a many-authored project isn't simply fun or easy.

This is also a reason why projects should practice good hygiene upfront, and
checking up on this— and propagating best practices— is one of the services a
packager can provide to their upstreams.