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Comment by linksbro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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