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Comment by tossaway234234 | Hacker News Reader

If not everyone responds, or some people decline, then the code they contributed will have to be rewritten. It's a pain, but pretty much the only way to ensure all code is compliant. I assume there is some tool that combines a blame line with a licence.

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I've read about code being rewritten for license compliance but how does that work in practice?

Even a self contained file isn't so straightforward as how would you differentiate between "new code" and simply copying the old one as a "new patch"?

I don't know if a rewrite for the sake of license compliance because of an actively litigating party has ever happened in OSS. In practice, we just don't know how far someone would go to prove ownership over individual characters in a source file.

I wonder if Mozilla went through this:

"It is possible that there may be Mozilla source files containing contributed code for which the copyright holders refuse to grant permission for relicensing under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license. In those cases we will investigate whether the situation can be resolved by someone writing new code to replace the code which cannot be relicensed. (This may require writing a complete new source file, or simply rewriting one or more portions of an existing file.)"

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html#per...

I have no doubt that there are projects that have rewritten code because of the hypothetical threat of imagined future legal action, but I don't actually know of real legal action that has happened because of a relicensing, and the pressing question is what sort of form that copyright claim would take (which we won't know without a dedicated prosecutor, but can probably guess at).

It has. The end result of the ATT v. BSD [1] suit was that certain files had to be rewritten

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

To save you guys a click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc....

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