Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copyright claim

Re:Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copy... by lolc on Thursday December 12, 2019 @09:28AM (#21772074)

> As it is, nginx is licensed under BSD

That has just been cast into doubt.

> copyright of the original nginx project are reassigned

Not reassigned. It would be found to never have been licensed.

> need only replicate something resembling the original codebase

Which is impossible without it becoming derived of the original. If you want to apply a patch to something it must first look like the original. A good chunk of the patches will have been derived from the original substantially. Which means they'd need to be rewritten too.

> the prospective future "owners" of nginx cannot realistically hope to control

Yes they could exert a lot of power and force people into paying. A clean-room effort would take a year! In that year they could go after everybody who is distributing old copies.

This is as bad as it gets if that company is found to own copyright.

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Re:Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copy... by dragandj on Thursday December 12, 2019 @12:34PM (#21774070)

In that case, who would pay the new "owner" for the now unlicensed parts provided by outside contributors?

I see this having only two outcomes: either nothing happens (it stays BSD), or it becomes nuclear waste, and new owner cannot sell it because it is plagued by mutually incompatible legal status of different portions of the code.

I can't see how the third version, where it stays clean, but the new owner can milk it, is possible.

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Re:Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copy... by lolc on Thursday December 12, 2019 @12:44PM (#21774204)

Well if it becomes toxic waste they could force everybody currently using it into licensing it from them. They could even try and go for damages for previous use.

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Re:Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copy... by dragandj on Thursday December 12, 2019 @01:27PM (#21774674)

But my point it that these customers would not be protected by that license, since they'd be using the code of other contributors without license, so they'd still be potentially open for extortion by hundreds other entities (I suppose there were many contributors).

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Re:Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copy... by lolc on Sunday December 22, 2019 @07:19PM (#21860625)

Hmm yes interesting. Thanks for pointing that out!

The other patch authors could retroactively agree with the robber that their derived publications have been without license. Then they too could block usage of Nginx by pledging to go after anybody who gets a license from the robber.

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