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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

I mean, read the diff and decide for yourself: https://github.com/Haidra-Org/hordelib/commit/568738d68b6343...

I find it hard to be sympathetic, personally.

You don't remove copyright notices when you copy code files from one repo to another.

This is seemly a clearly vindictive and deliberate action by the OP to remove credit for the files, due to whatever personal history:

> I would rather not have any mention or contribution of this person in our library, as they go against everything the Free Software movement stands for!

The GPL FAQ is unambiguous on this point: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IWantCredit

It's petty and seems quite dishonest to file a DMCA for something like this, and fixing it should give you a perfectly ok license to continue to use it.

...but just think, if you hadn't been petty and removed it in the first place, it wouldn't have been an issue at all.

To some degree, you reap what you sow.

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Also - isn't it critical to maintain details of copyright holders in case of any future desire to relicence?

Absolutely. Or in case of a copyright claim, … It’s crucial to know where which piece of code came from and piecing it together from git history is going to be painful.

Hello, lead dev here. Yes there's ugly personal history, but as I said, I don't want to get into a he said/he said discussion because it won't go anywhere. Will just say that it's bad enough that it forced us to rewrite an AGPL library (in which I was personally contributing for months) from scratch instead of reusing it, as we had all the permission to do so. That's how bad it got in the background.

That said, I was under the impression that my actions were License compliant due to section 7b

> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:

> Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or

I.e. since that blurb didn't request explicit preservation, it was ok to remove.

  > I don't want to get into a he said/he said discussion because it won't go anywhere

Nothing against you or your project, but this is hardly a "they said I said" thing, this is clearly a violation of the AGPLv3.

It surely could be handled nicer and all that, probably from both sides, not questioning that part, but messing with copyright statements willy-nilly is never a good idea if one isn't absolutely sure (i.e., got legal counsel) that it is OK.

  > Will just say that it's bad enough that it forced us to rewrite an AGPL library

One _can_ fork a AGPLv3 project, but one needs to adhere to the terms.

  > in which I was personally contributing for months

Again, not wanting to go against you, but you made those contributions accepting the License of the work.

And more importantly the AGPLv3 will also protect your contributions from being re-licensed or have your copyright notices removed, well at least if you did not sign some CLA, i.e., the protection goes both ways.

  > I was under the impression that my actions were License compliant due to section 7

Well:

  > *(if authorized by the copyright holders of that material)*

Did you get authorization by the copyright holders? As the terms of section 7 are not unconditionally, which is made quite clear, they are just to make the license a bit more flexible to adapt to the rights a project want's to grant to forks to differ what counts as (forbidden) "further restrictions" and what might not.

The point I was mentioning in section 7b is this

> Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices

Given that this didn't appear. I felt it was OK.

> One _can_ fork a AGPLv3 project, but one needs to adhere to the terms.

We had already forked and had kept all the copyrights statements intact. We still ended up having to rewrite...

> We still ended up having to rewrite...

Why?

This is where we would be getting into the ugly background which I don't want to get into here because it's stuff that goes into private conversations and hearsay.

Suffice to say, hlky was absolutely hell-bent on us NOT using the previous AGPL library after we forked it, and used many underhanded means to cause us constant stress and worries. At some point we decided it wasn't worth it.

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