Re:Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-li...
by formerly_proven on Saturday October 31, 2020 @06:00PM
(#24955543)
With some of these minor contributions there is probably a debate about threshold of originality to be had: something that's not protected by copyright is in the public domain.
Re:Octotree – Proprietary Firefox extension contains AGPL-li...
by solomatov on Saturday October 31, 2020 @06:29PM
(#24955729)
IANAL, but my understanding is that simply reverting the contributions by these folks, and then independently reimplementing them should make the full copyright to be owned by the original author.
Could anyone comment here? What's the threshold for this?
> For context, when NodeBB faced this possibility, we simply contacted every single contributor and asked nicely if they'd assign over their ownership of their contribution to us (note the use of the word "assign", not "license", a license is revocable, an assignment is not).
This is certainly the correct way to do hit. However, in this specific case, it appears that as of the current code, not many external contributions remain.
The author of the original issue in the meantime forked the repo and continued to document the issue there [1] as it was being constantly closed, but as is evident from his own `git blame` analysis, most of the contributions are from staff, and the external contributions are basically negligible.
There's one author with 30 LOC, one with 10 LOC, and the remaining 12 contributors average less then 4 LOC each.
[1] https://github.com/christianbundy/octotree/issues/1#issuecom...