Another trick I recall was using microkernels to isolate GPL code from proprietary code so new stuff doesn’t need go be shared. It was in OKL4’s marketing, especially for Android phones.
after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get DJI to release the source for the GPL-licensed software it ships, he had created and published a root exploit for the company’s drones in retaliation.
Sorry, but I think you’re overreacting a bit there.
I think the question boils down to whether your remaining contributions constitute a derivative work.
What this means in practice is that copyright claims are usually added only for substancial rewrites or entirely new files. When modifying an existing work in a way that does not make the result a derivative work in the legal sense, it is better to retain the original copyright and licence claim, i.e. fold the contributions into it. This is because ownership of copyright implies the power to change the licence of the work. So adding copyright statements is not something that should be done willy-nilly because otherwise anyone getting a one-line fix into a project could arbitrarily change the licence of the affected file (EDIT: Of course, copyright could nowadays be tracked to individual lines thanks to version control, but the legal rules involved are older than version control, and always up to interpretation by lawyers).
You deserve recognition for your contributions, no doubt. But adding a copyright claim is not the only way to recognize a contribution.
Sorry, but I think you’re overreacting a bit there.
Well, if you feel that as an “overreaction”, do not visit Italy. Ever. It would be scary, to you. ;-)
Of course, copyright could nowadays be tracked to individual lines thanks to version control, but the legal rules involved are older than version control, and always up to interpretation by lawyers.
And this is exactly what I’m afraid of!
I don’t want a lawyer to sue me because he saw my code in my project and he trusts the (git rebased) Harvey’s repository more then mine.
You deserve recognition for your contributions, no doubt. But adding a copyright claim is not the only way to recognize a contribution.
Sorry, but I think you have completely misunderstood the matter.
Not your fault, though.
I do not care about any recognition from Harvey’s team. Really.
My contributions were gifts. Hadn’t I suggested my friend to try Harvey, I would have never noticed the issue.
Had they moved, say, to GitLab after an unfortunate git rebase, I would have had an hard time to prove I’ve ever actually contributed a single line of those I reused in my project.
I think you are now mixing up two different parts of the conversation.
Yes, they removed a lot of code with your copyright on it, and that was done correctly and you already said you had no problem with that. But this is not the part of the conversation I am talking about.
You claim that they must add your copyright back to those changes, and what I am saying (and I think it is what dancrossnyc from Harvey is saying as well) is that your copyright claim on those changes is valid only if those changes consititute a “derivative work”. If they don’t, then no copyright claim can be made which extends on that of the original copyright on the codebase. Which means both you and Harvey are entitled to make these same “non-derivative-work” mechanical changes in your projects without risking copyright infringement. So I don’t follow your argument that your copyright claim must be on those changes in order to legally protect your derived project. Essentially, there was no reason to ever have your copyright on those specific changes in the first place.
Now, for contributions which are consiered a “derived work”, the situation is different, and this is why Harvy removed all of those changes we (you and me) both agree they should remove.
But you are still pursuing an argument with Harvey which boils down to the question of what constitutes a “derivative work”. I think it’s not worth having that argument for either side. Just chill. It seems they’ve already removed all they had to remove.
No, sorry, I know there’s a lot of confusion and some contradictory statements in that issue, so it needs a careful read.
The statement
If you feel you can’t remove those changes because they are important for Harvey, you can still add my copyright statement to each of modified files.
was ironic.
I just wanted to point out that they had to use alternative solutions. That exist.
Btw, as I said otherwhere, I wont bore them anymore.
According to my lawyer, my github fork (frozen before the rebase) and the archive on the WaybackMachine should be enough to defeat in court any pretension on my code.
The medium post is, as it has been defined elsewhere, just “a cautionary tale”, for younger devs pondering to contribute to Open Source Software.
Well, I cannot measure everything I do with money. I have three daughters I love most.
I do my mistakes, but I know they learn from what I do, not from what I say.
I pay the bills as a programmer.
Compared to the value of the time I’ve spent hacking for Harvey, the lawyer’s fee is tiny.
But compared to the value I put in my own fork, the time I spent for Harvey means nothing.
Where I’m from trying to get value for your money isn’t considered greedy.
I respect you value your time invested, but I do think spending on it is a sunken cost fallacy, trying to recover an unrecoverable loss. In the future sign your commits and keep your version of the repository on github. Don’t be so concerned about what people do with your work unless it costs you real money in some way. That’s how I would do it anyway.
I do not think that my contribution to Harvey was “an unrecoverable loss”.
I will keep to send bugfixes to Open Source Softwares that I use in the future.
Opportunistically, since I do not want to maintain them locally.
But I will not donate my time and skills to them again.
Obviously I won’t just look at the license they use!
I’ve worked very well with communities using all sort of license.
I’ve never checked before, but you can still see my name in php-mode, for example, 14 years after my introduction of PHP 5 support.
In the future I will look at the leaders, who they are, where they work…
I will consider to donate only if I’ll see they both trust and respect their developers and users.
And this will automatically exclude many big firms that treat their users as laboratory mice.
Oh, as for GPG signing the commits, it’s a good idea.
But back then, in 2015, Harvey had a convoluted “standardized” workflow based on GerritHub.
It was so cumbersome that, after I managed to integrate travis-ci and coverity scan to Harvey, I fought against it very strongly. You might find something on the mailing list.
But given it used to break almost weekly, adding GPG signatures project wide was unrealistic.
They just required devs to sign-off commits.
Another trick I recall was using microkernels to isolate GPL code from proprietary code so new stuff doesn’t need go be shared. It was in OKL4’s marketing, especially for Android phones.
Hahaha I love this.
Well, it’s very interesting to contrast this article with what happened to my copyright in Harvey.
What a perfect timing!
Sorry, but I think you’re overreacting a bit there.
I think the question boils down to whether your remaining contributions constitute a derivative work.
What this means in practice is that copyright claims are usually added only for substancial rewrites or entirely new files. When modifying an existing work in a way that does not make the result a derivative work in the legal sense, it is better to retain the original copyright and licence claim, i.e. fold the contributions into it. This is because ownership of copyright implies the power to change the licence of the work. So adding copyright statements is not something that should be done willy-nilly because otherwise anyone getting a one-line fix into a project could arbitrarily change the licence of the affected file (EDIT: Of course, copyright could nowadays be tracked to individual lines thanks to version control, but the legal rules involved are older than version control, and always up to interpretation by lawyers).
You deserve recognition for your contributions, no doubt. But adding a copyright claim is not the only way to recognize a contribution.
Well, if you feel that as an “overreaction”, do not visit Italy. Ever. It would be scary, to you. ;-)
And this is exactly what I’m afraid of!
I don’t want a lawyer to sue me because he saw my code in my project and he trusts the (
git rebased) Harvey’s repository more then mine.There was a reason why I asked to
git revertthe commits when they said that they prefer to remove the contributions instead of fixing the attribution.Many reasons, actually.
Sorry, but I think you have completely misunderstood the matter.
Not your fault, though.
I do not care about any recognition from Harvey’s team. Really.
My contributions were gifts. Hadn’t I suggested my friend to try Harvey, I would have never noticed the issue.
But they removed the few copyright statements I added back in 2015 and also removed the CONTRIBUTORS file that contained my name (because it was “too much trouble” to maintain it).
Had they moved, say, to GitLab after an unfortunate
git rebase, I would have had an hard time to prove I’ve ever actually contributed a single line of those I reused in my project.I think you are now mixing up two different parts of the conversation.
Yes, they removed a lot of code with your copyright on it, and that was done correctly and you already said you had no problem with that. But this is not the part of the conversation I am talking about.
What I am talking about is your concern about some changes which were left in their source tree after your copyrighted code was removed: https://github.com/Harvey-OS/harvey/issues/698#issuecomment-365286356
You claim that they must add your copyright back to those changes, and what I am saying (and I think it is what dancrossnyc from Harvey is saying as well) is that your copyright claim on those changes is valid only if those changes consititute a “derivative work”. If they don’t, then no copyright claim can be made which extends on that of the original copyright on the codebase. Which means both you and Harvey are entitled to make these same “non-derivative-work” mechanical changes in your projects without risking copyright infringement. So I don’t follow your argument that your copyright claim must be on those changes in order to legally protect your derived project. Essentially, there was no reason to ever have your copyright on those specific changes in the first place.
Now, for contributions which are consiered a “derived work”, the situation is different, and this is why Harvy removed all of those changes we (you and me) both agree they should remove.
But you are still pursuing an argument with Harvey which boils down to the question of what constitutes a “derivative work”. I think it’s not worth having that argument for either side. Just chill. It seems they’ve already removed all they had to remove.
No, sorry, I know there’s a lot of confusion and some contradictory statements in that issue, so it needs a careful read.
The statement
was ironic.
I just wanted to point out that they had to use alternative solutions. That exist.
Btw, as I said otherwhere, I wont bore them anymore.
According to my lawyer, my github fork (frozen before the rebase) and the archive on the WaybackMachine should be enough to defeat in court any pretension on my code.
The medium post is, as it has been defined elsewhere, just “a cautionary tale”, for younger devs pondering to contribute to Open Source Software.
why would you waste money on a lawyer for something you don’t even make money with. Your whole story is baffling.
Well, I cannot measure everything I do with money. I have three daughters I love most.
I do my mistakes, but I know they learn from what I do, not from what I say.
But your is a good question, since I’m often called “greedy” just because I’m Ads Adverse.
My decision was pretty simple. And rational.
I pay the bills as a programmer.
Compared to the value of the time I’ve spent hacking for Harvey, the lawyer’s fee is tiny.
But compared to the value I put in my own fork, the time I spent for Harvey means nothing.
Where I’m from trying to get value for your money isn’t considered greedy.
I respect you value your time invested, but I do think spending on it is a sunken cost fallacy, trying to recover an unrecoverable loss. In the future sign your commits and keep your version of the repository on github. Don’t be so concerned about what people do with your work unless it costs you real money in some way. That’s how I would do it anyway.
I do not think that my contribution to Harvey was “an unrecoverable loss”.
I will keep to send bugfixes to Open Source Softwares that I use in the future.
Opportunistically, since I do not want to maintain them locally.
But I will not donate my time and skills to them again.
Obviously I won’t just look at the license they use!
I’ve worked very well with communities using all sort of license.
I’ve never checked before, but you can still see my name in php-mode, for example, 14 years after my introduction of PHP 5 support.
In the future I will look at the leaders, who they are, where they work…
I will consider to donate only if I’ll see they both trust and respect their developers and users.
And this will automatically exclude many big firms that treat their users as laboratory mice.
Oh, as for GPG signing the commits, it’s a good idea.
But back then, in 2015, Harvey had a convoluted “standardized” workflow based on GerritHub.
It was so cumbersome that, after I managed to integrate travis-ci and coverity scan to Harvey, I fought against it very strongly. You might find something on the mailing list.
But given it used to break almost weekly, adding GPG signatures project wide was unrealistic.
They just required devs to sign-off commits.