IANAL These are just some of my opinions gathered from information surrounding the Bukkit drama. I have spent a good deal of time this week researching what I c

IANAL These are just some of my opinions gathered from information surrounding the Bukkit drama. I have spent a good deal of time this week researching what I could, but I can very well be wrong. I'm not arguing that anyone, including Wesley, should have lost valid interests in the code they developed. Please consider the following scenarios: 1) Contributor was clear to license his contributions free end clear under the LGPL. They contributed them to a project that was a priori in violation of said license. If they were unaware of the conflicted project status and were led to believe it was valid LGPL, they should have sought correcting actions as a soon as they were made aware. 1.a) If they knew that contributing their code would directly create a violation of the LGPL, they shouldn't have contributed. If they knew and did it anyway, they are party to violating the license. 2) Contributor code is encumbered and isn't free to be licensed under the LGPL. Depending on circumstances, just because you type the keys doesn't mean you're completely clear of another entities interest in the work. In this case not only is the project encumbered but so is the contribution. It's unknown what the validity of any license would be in this case. A case could be made that the trigger to this recent mess, Wesley's DMCA notice, is scenario #1. That the contributors were just recently made aware that the project they contributed to was violating the LGPL. They would be right to seek redress for the violation of the license. This is the process working like it's supposed to. It could also be that we're seeing cases of #1.a (or if skeptical #2). Certain contributors weren't just submitting patches to an email list. They were also the ones accepting pull requests to the main repo. It would stand to reason that they would be aware of the status of the main project. It's a legal nightmare. In _any_ of the three scenarios, the status of the project as a whole is still infringing. It's so encumbered that it can't be distributed and individual rights owners who are being violated should seek remedy. This doesn't take the rights away from anyone. If they have found their rights to be violated, they should speak to an attorney. Addedum to 1.a "You can't violate your own license." The contributor could have dual-licensed the code under the LGPL, but then contributed it to the project under some other, unspecified license. That would be ok depending on the terms of the other license, but it's not documented and impossible to verify. Also, we have contributors stating that their LGPL licensed code being violated, which discounts this possibility.