Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-licensed code

Re:Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-li... by nsajko on Saturday October 31, 2020 @04:30PM (#24954951)

> All in all it took us under a week to secure the assignments, and any who did not sign we simply rewrote their lines of code, or we would have, but everybody signed.

IANAL, but this doesn't make much sense. Changing all lines that come from a single author can still result in a derivative work. In fact that even seems like a probable outcome, assuming that author's contributions were copyrightable in the first place.

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Re:Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-li... by amenod on Saturday October 31, 2020 @05:16PM (#24955257)

I guess the proper process here is that one starts with the code as it was before the contribution, with a ticket describing what needs to be done, and writes the missing code. Preferably this is done by a person who never saw the contributed code. Then you merge all future commits on top of this.

If there are merge conflicts, it can be a lot of work for small (== no) gain, but it would put you in clear.

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Re:Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-li... by julianlam on Saturday October 31, 2020 @07:14PM (#24956009)

Good point.

Barring something like a `git revert` (which depending on age of the commit might not even be possible), I would imagine a manual revert done to the best of your ability (followed by a rewrite) would be considered a good faith attempt.

Whether or not this would get you into legal trouble is left as an exercise to the reader. IA(also)NAL.

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