5 ms·

Not a lawyer but, If it was released under an open source license by people who did not legally have permission to change the license, then yes this is possibl

Not a lawyer but, If it was released under an open source license by people who did not legally have permission to change the license, then yes this is possible. It sucks, and you should likely still challenge it. But they may have the legal high ground. It's like if a stolen painting is given away or sold. The recipient is may have no knowledge the painting is stolen and acting in good faith. But the original owners before it was stolen are still the legal owners.

mreome 6y ago
Yeah, not much to go by from the snips, but "After DDN’s acquisition ... subsequently improperly open sourced ... without DDN’s permission" [emphasis added] makes it sound like this is what they are claiming happened. That someone released the source code as open source when they didn't have the copyrights to it anymore. Not knowing all the facts it's hard to say, but there is a possibility they may have the law on their side here. This is kind of an interesting question in open-source. Developers tend to just assume that a license is valid, but that's only true if the license issuer had full copyright of the code to begin with (work-product agreements become a possible source of complication here). There is always a chance that someone could come along later and claim copyright over some/all of that code, which could by then be forked and/or incorporated into various projects.
- jopsen 6y ago
  Claiming a rouge employee entered agreement/sale/purchase/contract and therefore said agreement is invalid, probably only works in some cases. I'm no lawyer, but I would guess that if senior management of a subdivision is doing something it's hard to claim "rouge employee" :) Otherwise, corporations would break all sorts of contracts claiming they were never valid in the first place.
- itronitron 6y ago
  >> Developers tend to just assume that a license is valid They also tend to assume that if the license is valid then the code is also not implementing any unlicensed patents.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
101404 6y ago
OP could probably go after the person responsible for the unauthorised licence change and sue for damages (lost hours worked). Just a guess, ianal.
gpm 6y ago
If that happened I think you might be right. But it sounds like they are claiming that that happened a year ago... and they just noticed now? I think they would have a difficult time convincing a court that that is actually what happened. Of course this is only relevant if you're willing to go to court over this, which is probably only the case if (at a minimum) you have a fairly substantial financial investment riding on this - or you have "fuck you money". And if you are willing to go to court over this go find a real lawyer instead of listening to HN.
wegs 6y ago
It's a bit more complex than that. There's the legal concept of apparent authority. Let's say I go into a bank. The bank requires an officer to approve all loans. A minimum-wage teller offers me a loan with a 2% interest rate, with absolutely no authority to do so. I don't know that, and I come out thinking I have a 2% loan. The bank is generally still required to honor the terms of that loan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_authority If forensics here prove that the person who open-sourced did not have the authority to do so (but was affiliated with whoever holds copyright on EdgeFS), and that OP had no reasonable way to know they did not have that authority, the most likely outcome is that: * Nextenra could not pull back the license. * Nextenta's recourse would be to go after whatever employee open-sourced it without authority, not OP. This contrasts with an example where an unaffiliated party posted Nextenta's source under an open source license. If you post the Windows source code under the GPL, and you don't work for Microsoft, and I make use of that source code, that's when I'm also liable. I'm not a lawyer. This isn't legal advice, which I couldn't give without knowing specifics of what happened when and how. This is merely a correction to the post which says: "If it was released under an open source license by people who did not legally have permission to change the license, then yes this is possible." This was statement is misleading, at least under US law. I'll also mention you can't get reasonable even legal information without posting a lot more background (two short exerts aren't adequate for anyone to have a legal opinion).
- jsiepkes 6y ago
  > I'll also mention you can't get reasonable even legal information without posting a lot more background (two short exerts aren't adequate for anyone to have a legal opinion). There isn't that much more to show but here is the entire DMCA takedown request which I received: https://gist.github.com/siepkes/8e1f51e2ce9e44ba7116ed79e49298f4 https://gist.github.com/siepkes/8e1f51e2ce9e44ba7116ed79e492... > If forensics here prove that the person who open-sourced did not have the authority to do so Announcements of the opensourcing were made on various places (like Reddit [1]) by Dmitry Yusupov who is Co-founder and CTO of Nexenta. He also made a lot of commits in the OSS Github repo which was Apache licensed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/edgefs/comments/cf0o2b/edgefs_open_sourced/ https://www.reddit.com/r/edgefs/comments/cf0o2b/edgefs_open_...

mreome 6y ago

Yeah, not much to go by from the snips, but "After DDN’s acquisition ... subsequently improperly open sourced ... without DDN’s permission" [emphasis added] makes it sound like this is what they are claiming happened. That someone released the source code as open source when they didn't have the copyrights to it anymore. Not knowing all the facts it's hard to say, but there is a possibility they may have the law on their side here. This is kind of an interesting question in open-source. Developers tend to just assume that a license is valid, but that's only true if the license issuer had full copyright of the code to begin with (work-product agreements become a possible source of complication here). There is always a chance that someone could come along later and claim copyright over some/all of that code, which could by then be forked and/or incorporated into various projects.

jopsen 6y ago
Claiming a rouge employee entered agreement/sale/purchase/contract and therefore said agreement is invalid, probably only works in some cases. I'm no lawyer, but I would guess that if senior management of a subdivision is doing something it's hard to claim "rouge employee" :) Otherwise, corporations would break all sorts of contracts claiming they were never valid in the first place.
itronitron 6y ago
>> Developers tend to just assume that a license is valid They also tend to assume that if the license is valid then the code is also not implementing any unlicensed patents.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

101404 6y ago

OP could probably go after the person responsible for the unauthorised licence change and sue for damages (lost hours worked). Just a guess, ianal.

gpm 6y ago

If that happened I think you might be right. But it sounds like they are claiming that that happened a year ago... and they just noticed now? I think they would have a difficult time convincing a court that that is actually what happened. Of course this is only relevant if you're willing to go to court over this, which is probably only the case if (at a minimum) you have a fairly substantial financial investment riding on this - or you have "fuck you money". And if you are willing to go to court over this go find a real lawyer instead of listening to HN.

wegs 6y ago

It's a bit more complex than that. There's the legal concept of apparent authority. Let's say I go into a bank. The bank requires an officer to approve all loans. A minimum-wage teller offers me a loan with a 2% interest rate, with absolutely no authority to do so. I don't know that, and I come out thinking I have a 2% loan. The bank is generally still required to honor the terms of that loan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_authority If forensics here prove that the person who open-sourced did not have the authority to do so (but was affiliated with whoever holds copyright on EdgeFS), and that OP had no reasonable way to know they did not have that authority, the most likely outcome is that: * Nextenra could not pull back the license. * Nextenta's recourse would be to go after whatever employee open-sourced it without authority, not OP. This contrasts with an example where an unaffiliated party posted Nextenta's source under an open source license. If you post the Windows source code under the GPL, and you don't work for Microsoft, and I make use of that source code, that's when I'm also liable. I'm not a lawyer. This isn't legal advice, which I couldn't give without knowing specifics of what happened when and how. This is merely a correction to the post which says: "If it was released under an open source license by people who did not legally have permission to change the license, then yes this is possible." This was statement is misleading, at least under US law. I'll also mention you can't get reasonable even legal information without posting a lot more background (two short exerts aren't adequate for anyone to have a legal opinion).

jsiepkes 6y ago
> I'll also mention you can't get reasonable even legal information without posting a lot more background (two short exerts aren't adequate for anyone to have a legal opinion). There isn't that much more to show but here is the entire DMCA takedown request which I received: https://gist.github.com/siepkes/8e1f51e2ce9e44ba7116ed79e49298f4 https://gist.github.com/siepkes/8e1f51e2ce9e44ba7116ed79e492... > If forensics here prove that the person who open-sourced did not have the authority to do so Announcements of the opensourcing were made on various places (like Reddit [1]) by Dmitry Yusupov who is Co-founder and CTO of Nexenta. He also made a lot of commits in the OSS Github repo which was Apache licensed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/edgefs/comments/cf0o2b/edgefs_open_sourced/ https://www.reddit.com/r/edgefs/comments/cf0o2b/edgefs_open_...