Ask HN: Ethics on Deleting Git History | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Ethics on Deleting Git History

11 pointsunboxingelf3 comments

I have a popular public repository on Github under an AGPL-3.0 license. Recently I discovered a number of instances where the repository was cloned, git history was blown away, and the source is hosted under a different account and repository name. In most cases the license is preserved, but I’m curious the ethics of not forking and rewriting history such that there is zero link to the original work.

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The clause you're looking for is #4:

    You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

What it says is, they are free to make copies and transmit those copies, so long as the copyright notice is preserved. If you have a copyright.txt in your repos, they have to keep that. That's separate from the license; the AGPL is not the copyright notice, only a license to redistribute. It's part of the whole of the copyright, but not all of it. Attribution is explicitly required.

That said, if you had no copyright notice, that is a copyright notice - the license allows them to distribute that lack of notice. Add a copyright.txt to your repos, and if they update their copies to strip it, you've got right to send a takedown.

With the license intact, I wouldn't say it's unethical to remove the history[0]. It's functionally the same as "it would make my life easier to copy-paste this code into my app while fulfilling licensing requirements). At the end of the day, an intact license should cover any attribution needs, and I'd say the history is separate from the code (otherwise, for example, a project in violation of a license could never undo that violation).

[0]It's a whole lot of other bad things though: bad practice, and confusing, and something I'd never considered doing.

What is the link to the popular repository?

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