Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 06:57:21 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> > Do you think a few more verdicts like that will influence small FLOSS
> > projects? In that they will not apply proposed fixes "faster, faster,
> > faster",
> 
> You complained no one here was a lawyer and any residual changes would be
> deemed not qualifying under copyright law. 

I questioned that. I didn't claim it. In particular, I questioned whether
authors of one-line or tiny patches (and we still don't know what code
changes are subject for discussion and whether they are still left), who
explicitly offer this "work" to project authors for copying or as
inspiration, would always expect full consideration of copyright and
related rights for such a contribution.  I questioned whether the code
contributions may have been considered insignificant by *both* the creator
and the project developers as to silently agree that no special or legally
pedantic handling would be necessary, and giving credits in documentation
would be a fair move and honest acknowledgement of the support and not due
to legal requirements only (a contributor's right to be credited),
with the contributor actually demanding to be credited. Audacious wouldn't
be what it is without its core developers doing most of the work, and
I think most external contributors understand that and accept that.

The possibility that someone manages to get a [possibly tiny] patch copied
into the project code base and tries to exploit the legal consequences
[with perhaps hostile intentions] some time later is not much of interest
to me in this particular discussion. There are other risks that are beyond
this topic, such as someone copying verbatim from project B, submitting to
project C, keeping secret about the contribution's origin.

Meanwhile, there has been a clarification from an Audacious core developer
via private mail to several participants in this thread, confirming the
effort that has gone into trying to track down and contact everyone
holding copyright on a piece of the Audacious source code.

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