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Contrary to most people here, I don't think the author of Octotree has much to worry about. While there is a long list of contributors to the project, only 10 h
by deng 6y ago
Contrary to most people here, I don't think the author of Octotree has much to worry about. While there is a long list of contributors to the project, only 10 have contributed 10 lines of code or more. My understanding is that a change consisting of less than 10 lines of code can be seen as trivial and hence does not need a copyright assignment (at least that's how the FSF handles it, and they're pretty strict with this stuff).
Of these ten people, six were hired to work on Octotree, so he should have copyright for those. The other four together wrote less than 100 lines of code. If he has removed or rewritten these lines, he should be fine. (Even if he hasn't, I would consider this a very minor violation.)
- gspr 6y agoMaybe he could indeed pull off the relicensing for the reasons you suggest. He's still in deep shit: nobody will touch this project with a 3 m pole anymore, and any forks based on the last AGPL version will have a field day of attention. Soon enough, the original project will be irrelevant. Independently of whether he's right or not, this guy just killed his project (or his control of the project).
- deng 6y agoOh, he handles this situation very poorly, no question about that. That doesn't change the fact that he and his team wrote the vast majority of the original code. The long list of contributors does not reflect that.
- lasagnaphil 6y agoAnd from the latest comment on this issue (https://github.com/christianbundy/octotree/issues/1#issuecomment-720027778 https://github.com/christianbundy/octotree/issues/1#issuecom...): It seems that the project switched from MIT to AGPL around 2016, so all the contributor commits before that doesn't matter. Excluding those, there's only 10 commits from people outside the team, which frankly isn't a big deal. Anyways, it's frustrating that the author is kinda acting a bit scummy for something that might not have been even a problem. If he was a bit patient and had just got permission from those people beforehand... (I don't really think any of those 10 people would object to it since the commits aren't that big, unless one of them is a free software movement purist perhaps) And people generally agree on Mozilla's "95% author coverage" line so I think this controversy might have been a bit overblown.
- tester89 6y agoI was wondering if you have a source for that ?
- deng 6y agohttps://github.com/christianbundy/octotree/issues/1#issuecomment-719981875 https://github.com/christianbundy/octotree/issues/1#issuecom...