Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 22:09 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:33:26 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> > Please consider that in the Oracle vs Google case, Oracle ended up with
> > 9-line copying (plus a few test files), and the judge decided that *as*
> > *a* *matter* *of* *law* copyright infringement had occurred for those 9
> > lines.
> > 
> > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120510205659643#1119
> > 
> > That's what a very smart judge decided in a huge trial with some of the
> > countries top lawyers involved.
> > 
> > I don't have any clear idea what is not substantial enough to qualify for
> > copyright, but this very simple code did
> > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683
> 
> 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",
> 
>   http://www.i-programmer.info/news/193-android/4224-oracle-v-google-judge-is-a-programmer.html
> 
> but will spend a bit more time on creating the fixes/code changes themselves?

Such verdicts - which are nothing new - are why large F/OSS projects,
including Fedora and the kernel, have strict attribution polices and/or
contributor agreements. Why do you think we make contributors sign an
agreement explicitly granting the project permission to re-license their
code? Precisely to avoid situations like this.

If you want to run a significant F/OSS project and take contributions
from outside a very small and informally manageable circle, you _really_
need to have a strong attribution system and/or a contributor agreement
in place.

(Note, also, when I remember to, if I'm sending a patch to a small
project which hasn't managed to institute such a thing, I usually try to
include some kind of indication that I assign the copyright to the
author or something along those lines, to try and help them avoid this
kind of problem if they grow bigger and hit issues like this in the
future...)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net