Hacker News Reader

Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, this doesn't really help people who have no idea what Aesprite is or why it's suddenly an issue

https://www.aseprite.org/, looks like a really nice pixel art editor / sprite editor.

The author needs to eat, therefore relicense (I think).

It seems like this is the crux of the matter: https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/ and https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/issues/1666 https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite#license

View on HN

Who's really got skin in the game? Perhaps the author who spent countless hours pushing the project along all those years, he took all the risks and uncertainties. Yes, all contributions did help but being a humble contributor I wouldn't ask for any kind of eternal obligation. Otherwise what kind of help is that? If one wants to give, they just give, full stop. Why not stick to free will? Notice the word free.

If you feel this way you should never open source your work. Licences like the GPL as well as licences like BSD/MIT explicitly allow for forks like this.

Free doesn't pay the bills.

> this doesn't really help people who have no idea what Aesprite is or why it's suddenly an issue

People should read at least title of this news: "LibreSprite – fork of last open-source release of Aseprite pixel art editor".

If they will open link then they could read "History" chapter in README.md[0]

[0] https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite/blob/master/READM...

This was my thought exactly. The author isn’t asking the world, the tool is just $15. I believe in open software too, but this is pretty niche and if I really needed it I’d rather pay than not have it at all.

> The author needs to eat, therefore relicense (I think).

In my opinion it's the author who should have been seeking a fork then. Getting the approval of all the contributors to do so, knowing that those people won't be able to help anymore.

Also, that kind of thing is usually handled by a Pro version or advanced support for paid subscribers.

I took a brief look around the repo and it looks like the author is the sole contributor (at least the few files I looked at had plenty of commits but all by the author).

A project being GPL'd doesn't necessarily mean the copyright isn't owned by one party.

https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/graphs/contributors

He's clearly the top contributor, but not the sole contributor.

Sadly, it's why there's more and more projects adopting CLAs. Some that say that all the code you're contributing is owned by the project and not yourself. Allows for future relicensing in some cases.

Huh, thanks for that - I don't really use github and didn't know you could pull up that graph.

In that case it looks like most of the other contributors contributed after the CLA was added but there are still a few commits from before that point. Accordingly he should have sought permission from those people before changing the license.

He did.

I contributed a few minor fixes and got an email from David asking for permission to re-license.

> Sadly, it's why there's more and more projects adopting CLAs. Some that say that all the code you're contributing is owned by the project and not yourself. Allows for future relicensing in some cases.

You're conflating CLA and CTA/CAA, the difference is explained here [1], and it matters.

[1] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/860/what-is-t...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com