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. -- Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) - Linux 3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64 loadavg: 0.11 0.35 0.43 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
