It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem once a past contributor notices.
It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.
Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.
True but there is a workaround: a patchset to a specific upstream git commit and local compilation. Pretty much what PKGBUILD already does. LAME was developed this way for years. It was a patchset to reference source code under a nonfree license.
I’m far from an expert on licenses, but logic tells me that any version that was released with the previous license is still under that previous license. So it’s probably okay to fork from a previous version to maintain linux support?
AUR can. It’s just locally checking out the code from git and compiling it locally as well. I’m not a pro AUR maintainer but I’m not aware of a single AUR entry that ships software source code directly from AUR.
It doesn’t matter what the license say, because GitHub TOS (that everybody agree on when registering their account) explicitly allows forking any project hosted on GitHub, regardless of the project’s license.
Copyright is always about distribution. So yes, you are allowed to fork, but you are not allowed to distribute the copyrighted content to other people. And with the No Derivatives clause you are also not allowed to change it.
You might be able to stay in the gray are by telling everyone “build it yourself”, but nobody would be allowed to package it either.
To write a script that checks out upstream code and compiles it locally is not a distribution by a 3rd party. The code comes directly from Stenzek. That’s why he puts the Arch check there.
If that script happens to do a search and replace of archlinux with some random jibberish (so the check is no longer for archlinux), that’s still not a distribution of modified code because all code modifications happen locally.
Since it’s an open source project, it’s pretty easy to make a fork and readd Linux support.
Oh have some patience my friend
The licence doesn’t permit derivative works, so no forks and no downstream packages.
the license change is invalid as it’s based from GPL3 code and previous contributors did not allow the change
It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem once a past contributor notices.
It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.
Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.
Make a fork that supports Linux as satire since the whole situation is so crazy.
Edit: The joke being you could argue it’s fair use.
You’re right, the license is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (weird choice for a code license, but OK)
It’s not an open source license. Even CC warns against it because it isn’t a free media license.
CC4.0 licenses work for code. The language was made generic and no longer talks about performing music on stage and such.
Better to use CC NC for non commercial works than to homebrew your own text. CC BY and CC BY SA are GPLv3 compatible.
It’s easy enough to fork the code as it existed under GPL3. Violentmonkey did that when they forked from Tampermonkey.
This dev also doesn’t sound like he wants to put much effort into enforcing his license in the first place.
🏴☠️ 🦜 🏝️ ⛵
True but there is a workaround: a patchset to a specific upstream git commit and local compilation. Pretty much what PKGBUILD already does. LAME was developed this way for years. It was a patchset to reference source code under a nonfree license.
It’s crazy that this is legal.
Most software is like this, but you also don’t get to look at the source code either.
It’s probably not, unless all contributors agreed to the license change.
AFAIK they did.
Nope not according to the license. Now is the license change legit and allowed? I don’t know
I’m far from an expert on licenses, but logic tells me that any version that was released with the previous license is still under that previous license. So it’s probably okay to fork from a previous version to maintain linux support?
That’s actually the version that’s in the AUR, since they can’t put newer (fixed) code in there from the new versions.
AUR can. It’s just locally checking out the code from git and compiling it locally as well. I’m not a pro AUR maintainer but I’m not aware of a single AUR entry that ships software source code directly from AUR.
It doesn’t matter what the license say, because GitHub TOS (that everybody agree on when registering their account) explicitly allows forking any project hosted on GitHub, regardless of the project’s license.
Copyright is always about distribution. So yes, you are allowed to fork, but you are not allowed to distribute the copyrighted content to other people. And with the No Derivatives clause you are also not allowed to change it. You might be able to stay in the gray are by telling everyone “build it yourself”, but nobody would be allowed to package it either.
To write a script that checks out upstream code and compiles it locally is not a distribution by a 3rd party. The code comes directly from Stenzek. That’s why he puts the Arch check there.
If that script happens to do a search and replace of archlinux with some random jibberish (so the check is no longer for archlinux), that’s still not a distribution of modified code because all code modifications happen locally.