Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original license to separate file

Re:Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original l... by markslicker on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @03:51PM (#21706791)

I took a look. IANAL, however it is clear that they lift library sources and substitute their own LICENSE file to claim a copyright with different license terms. Just because the Zig sources don't carry a copyright notice does not mean they are not subject to copyright, so the least they could do is provide the original LICENSE file from Zig and make clear what their own contributions are and what license applies to them.

On the Zig side it would be better to include copyright notices with the files and maybe consider relicensing to GPL to avoid these situtations in the first place. Unfortunately many authors today are choosing non-copy left licences which might go against their intentions and probably their interests as well as software creators.

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Re:Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original l... by stock_toaster on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:47PM (#21717530)

Yeah, the MIT license is small/short enough that it is probably best practice to just slap it onto the top of every file. A single file LICENSE is instructive, but shouldn't be the only place you put a license, or it is apt to be fiddled around with and/or make it unclear which parts of the source are under which license, should the project be incorporated into something downstream.

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Re:Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original l... by markslicker on Thursday December 05, 2019 @08:51PM (#21718620)

A copyright notice could be a single line in a source file, just mentioning the authors and the license that applies.

It gets a bit complicated when you have many authors all contributing to a github repo. Some projects require the authors to sign off so that the copyright is assigned to a single entity, that makes relicensing easy. With an open source project like Zig it might be complicated to relicense since you have many contributors.

It seems that Zig should maintain a contributors file since they have chosen the joint copyright model with the MIT license. They could then refer to that in a copyright notice, which could be a single line per file.

On the Zen side however there seems to be a gross misunderstanding of copyright. Just because you make some changes to a source file (or no changes at all) does not allow you to completely reasign the copyright to yourself.

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