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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

So many comments are focusing on the MIT license. That is the license that applies if you obtain it via Github and redistribute it.

But this...

>> On August 26, 2015, I, @bucaran, and "oh-my-fish" collaborators, led by @bpinto, decided to replace the entire source code of "oh-my-fish!" with the entire source code of "wahoo", but keeping the "oh-my-fish" name.

... sounds like giving he consented to give ownership of the code to the oh-my-fish project, and is retroactively trying to apply the terms of the MIT project now that they've had a falling out. I think the takedown needs to be reversed.

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Replacing the code in the shared repository doesn't mean he transferred the copyright to them. When you contribute to a project, you still own the copyright, you just provided a licensed copy, and that project must still comply with it.

This is correct. For an arbitrary and hypothetical example, imagine that Linus woke up yesterday and decided to convert the Linux kernel to an Apache licensed project. The long and almost impossible task would be to contact each and every contributor to the Linux kernel and ask for the permission to change the license of their contribution. The "short" and "easy" task would be to write a new kernel and replace all of Linux with it, applying the new license. The old Linux kernel would still be a GPL project, but moving forward any contributions would need to be Apache licensed.

It appears that the latter example is somewhat like what happened here. The old Oh-My-Fish project was some licensed project. It could have even been a WTF Public License[0] that _did_ allow contributors to fork and remove attribution. At some point, all the code in the repo was replaced with new code under the MIT license that served the same purpose, and the repo's name was changed. Moving forward, someone continued to merge in the new code to the old repo and tried to remove attribution to the new code, breaking the new code's license.

The Oh-My-Fish project could have done a classical fork, severing ties with the Wahoo project just before the merge of the re-written code happened and continue to work in isolation, but it seems that they did not.

[0] http://www.wtfpl.net

Which is what happened to VLC, moving from GPL to LGPL. which took an incredible amount of work...

http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...

So if a contribution changes the LICENSE file without having every contributor agreement, won't this be an invalid LICENSE change?

From what I heard about the discussion, it seems like the LICENSE file has been altered by Jorge without all the OMF's contributors agreeing upon.

It's invalid only if the license change is inconsistent with the original license. That's why, for example, converting a project from MIT to GPL is fine, because doing so doesn't violate the terms of the MIT license.

That's fair - although I can't imagine letting someone rename my project and deciding to collaborate on it together while still trying to retain my own copyright notice on files. I hope we hear the other side of the story. My point is just that the MIT license itself isn't necessarily the issue here.

That's fair - although I can't imagine letting someone rename my project and deciding to collaborate on it together while still trying to retain my own copyright notice on files.

I don't understand, why not? That's in fact what usually happens; projects usually have a list of contributors, providing attribution.

For example: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS

The collaboration model of the Linux kernel is not remotely what I think the context describes. But like I said - perhaps reality is different - I still hope to hear the other side.

this hn comment links to a github comment (from the other side) that was deleted by the usurper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273780

Thanks. There's this too: https://github.com/derekstavis/diary-of-a-stolen-repository/...

There is also a school of thought that says once you have broken the conditions you would need to re-license the work and this might require a new negotiation; I don't think I've ever seen this line of argument tested in court however.

This is an interesting take. I think if they continued to any new wahoo code after the disagreement and breaking up, then that new code is infringing. However, the agreed upon merge code might not be subject to the DMCA.

Yes, but you missed the nuts and bolts of MIT subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
    copies or substantial portions of the Software.

In the DMCA it's stated that his copyright is not credited, so they are in violation of MIT. Which is what is happening here.

It depends on what happened to the license when the merge happened. Did the author of wahoo transfer the license to the authors of oh-my-fish? If so, then the code at the time of the merge is not subject to this DMCA notice. However, as I brought up, if after they had this tussle and split up, and oh-my-fish kept pulling new code from wahoo, then that code would be under wahoo's license and would need to be attributed as such (and I don't think it was attributed, hence this takedown request).

My point is that if they agreed to merge projects and wahoo didn't keep their license on it, then that code at the time of agreement is no longer under the exclusive copyright of the wahoo author.

You don't transfer a license; you might transfer copyright ownership, but there's no reason to believe he did so. He probably just gave them a copy of the code, which by default is still his under his copyright, and so they still need a license from him to use it.

When you contribute to a project, you can not remove it's LICENSE, you can only add more contributors. If you fail to do so, you can add your name on the LICENSE but not claim a DCMA Takedown.

If a project accepts your code, it's their job to add your name to the contributors list. It doesn't matter if you could have done so in your commit; if they're redistributing your code, they have to list you.

Actually, the author of Wahoo was also from both, an ethical point of view, author of OMF having contributed more than half of the code and from a legal point of view as an administrator in the GitHub repository. He himself merged his own PR. The problem is he and the other collaborators had "disagreements" and decided to split. He would return to Wahoo and the OMF folks would return to pre-Wahoo OMF. What actually happened is that a new project was created with the same name "oh-my-fish" and the old git history was simply pushed to the new repo. The LICENSE was also changed attributing the copyright to Bruno, the other OMF admin folk.

... are you the author of Wahoo, by the way? Sounds like you have an intimate knowledge of the events here.

Creator of Wahoo here. It's correct. I was one of the owners at omf, meaning I could delete, transfer or rename the repo.

@bucaran: i'm confused. why are you also commenting on this thread as Tzadeck?

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