DMCA notice against oh-my-fish

Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by icebraining on Thursday September 24, 2015 @10:36AM (#10271825)

Replacing the code in the shared repository doesn't mean he transferred the copyright to them. When you contribute to a project, you still own the copyright, you just provided a licensed copy, and that project must still comply with it.

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by uxp on Thursday September 24, 2015 @10:56AM (#10271955)

This is correct. For an arbitrary and hypothetical example, imagine that Linus woke up yesterday and decided to convert the Linux kernel to an Apache licensed project. The long and almost impossible task would be to contact each and every contributor to the Linux kernel and ask for the permission to change the license of their contribution. The "short" and "easy" task would be to write a new kernel and replace all of Linux with it, applying the new license. The old Linux kernel would still be a GPL project, but moving forward any contributions would need to be Apache licensed.

It appears that the latter example is somewhat like what happened here. The old Oh-My-Fish project was some licensed project. It could have even been a WTF Public License[0] that _did_ allow contributors to fork and remove attribution. At some point, all the code in the repo was replaced with new code under the MIT license that served the same purpose, and the repo's name was changed. Moving forward, someone continued to merge in the new code to the old repo and tried to remove attribution to the new code, breaking the new code's license.

The Oh-My-Fish project could have done a classical fork, severing ties with the Wahoo project just before the merge of the re-written code happened and continue to work in isolation, but it seems that they did not.

[0] http://www.wtfpl.net

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by Sephiroth87 on Thursday September 24, 2015 @11:24AM (#10272123)

Which is what happened to VLC, moving from GPL to LGPL. which took an incredible amount of work...

http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by jimmy123 on Thursday September 24, 2015 @12:32PM (#10272582)

So if a contribution changes the LICENSE file without having every contributor agreement, won't this be an invalid LICENSE change?

From what I heard about the discussion, it seems like the LICENSE file has been altered by Jorge without all the OMF's contributors agreeing upon.

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by justinlardinois on Thursday September 24, 2015 @05:57PM (#10275034)

It's invalid only if the license change is inconsistent with the original license. That's why, for example, converting a project from MIT to GPL is fine, because doing so doesn't violate the terms of the MIT license.

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by TallGuyShort on Thursday September 24, 2015 @11:12AM (#10272043)

That's fair - although I can't imagine letting someone rename my project and deciding to collaborate on it together while still trying to retain my own copyright notice on files. I hope we hear the other side of the story. My point is just that the MIT license itself isn't necessarily the issue here.

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by icebraining on Thursday September 24, 2015 @11:37AM (#10272208)

That's fair - although I can't imagine letting someone rename my project and deciding to collaborate on it together while still trying to retain my own copyright notice on files.

I don't understand, why not? That's in fact what usually happens; projects usually have a list of contributors, providing attribution.

For example: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by TallGuyShort on Thursday September 24, 2015 @12:02PM (#10272381)

The collaboration model of the Linux kernel is not remotely what I think the context describes. But like I said - perhaps reality is different - I still hope to hear the other side.

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by charles2013 on Thursday September 24, 2015 @06:20PM (#10275168)

this hn comment links to a github comment (from the other side) that was deleted by the usurper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273780

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by TallGuyShort on Thursday September 24, 2015 @07:35PM (#10275542)

Thanks. There's this too: https://github.com/derekstavis/diary-of-a-stolen-repository/...

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Re:DMCA notice against oh-my-fish by tankenmate on Thursday September 24, 2015 @11:06AM (#10272005)

There is also a school of thought that says once you have broken the conditions you would need to re-license the work and this might require a new negotiation; I don't think I've ever seen this line of argument tested in court however.

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