Re: Non Session Manager vs New Session Manager
by deathanatos on Friday July 09, 2021 @10:56PM
(#27790760)
IANAL, and this is not legal advice, but I am surprised at the FSF's view here. I believed (and believe) that copyright requires a substantive change to form a derivative work, and I would rather doubt that changing the comments counts. (Now, I think that precedents in the court have set the bar for "substantive" pretty low, but not that low.)
I would also say that "legal" is not always the same as "ethical", particularly in this circumstance.
Re: Non Session Manager vs New Session Manager
by beprogrammed on Friday July 09, 2021 @10:05PM
(#27790537)
That's a dirty move.
Later I looked at their fork. All they did was adding their names to the copyright and the new project name to the comment section for all the hundreds of files. I was frustrated as this was a clear case of taking copyright ownership for the software. I asked them to remove their names from the copyright unless it's new changes by them but they said GPL allowed it. I contacted FSF for clarification and FSF replied that it's allowed as changing the comment constituted a new change. It's a bunch of BS. It took the rosy glasses off my naive self and soured my view on open sourcing my software in the future.