Re[2]: [gentoo-dev] mac/xmms-mac licence issue

[Jakub Moc <jakub@gentoo.org>]

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25.12.2005, 3:51:15, Brian Harring wrote:


> Jakub responded in this thread about shipping a crap license... imo, 
> that's not the issue.

> The issue is that we would be knowingly violating a license (however 
> horrid the license is).  

> Two routes out of this- clean room reimplementation of the codec, or
> someone manages to track down the original author and gets the code 
> converted to a different license.  Latter still is tricky, since any 
> contributions to the project, you would need all authors to sign off 
> on the new license- this is assuming the project doesn't do 
> centralized copyright, and assuming people have actually contributed 
> to it beyond original author.


Not exactly what I meant. There's actually no (clear) license, the original
one would apply to the original code, not to the patches submitted after
it's been "re-licensed" under LGPL. Since upstream is dead, we can't ship
the original code (leaving the question why we should do it at all aside),
also we can't exactly find all the people who contributed the patches under
LGPL, and there's no way to contribute the code back to upstream as the
original license requires. Such code is a real "bargain" to commit :P

Rewrite from scratch, that's what left here. So much you get if you start
with a bullshit license originally and then go MIA. :/

-- 
Best regards,

 Jakub Moc
 mailto:jakub@gentoo.org
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 ... still no signature ;)

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