Licensing change: Audacious - GPLv3 --> BSD

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2012 08:34:46 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> 
> > The Original post was simply letting everyone know that upstream
> > changed their license. If you have an issue with that, they would be
> > the ones to address it, not anyone here in Fedora land.
> 
> Technically, if upstream bungled its relicencing, Fedora has no grounds to
> redistribute under the new licence and is committing fencing (or something
> similar, I don't know the exact English term)

That's exactly the smartass comments I do not need in this thread.

If there are specific concerns that the relicensing is illegal or has
not been done painstakingly and under consideration of all previous and
current copyright holders, either tell the project developer team or
tell me what to do at the Fedora side. Even without a license change,
there might be copyright infringement in any package redistributed by
Fedora. Who knows? There are even license changes which don't get
announced in accordance with the guidelines/policies.

If you think this case is special or a precedent, it would be easy to
retire the package and be done with it.

I've explained in lengths my observation of how much the old source code
has changed over the past years with regard to inherited pieces and
previous contributions, the regular removal of entire files including their
copyright notices, the major development and rewriting which got rid of
a lot of old cruft, the appearance of new base developers who contributed
work including copyright notices and compatible licensing terms, the
mentioning of new patch authors in the credits, the existence of source
files with the new licensing, and so on. As an observer of all those
changes over a long time, I have no reason to believe that the licensing
change has not been performed in a legally proper way.

> That's why people are concerned here (both at this exact incident and at
> the approach advocated for packaging legal checks)

One person has raised concerns about whether his translation contributions
may have been ignored. Meanwhile, the person has granted permission to
keep his translations in the BSD licensed project. The question whether
patch contributions are affected has not been examined or answered, at
least not in this thread or the private one.

All (most?) others in this thread have focused on legal generalization and
the theoretical threat that a single copyright holder's related rights may
have been ignored, even if it may be only a single line of possibly
trivial code, and that the single copyright holder might turn against the
project.

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