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Redis is no longer free software

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 15:18 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Redis is no longer free software by aragilar
Parent article: Redis is no longer free software

OUCH !!!

That's what AT&T did - they removed the BSD copyright notice, and lost all rights to Unix in the process ...

Somebody (a copyright holder, of course) ought to send them a nastygram and point out that they have just succeeded in the rather tricky task of placing themselves in breach of the BSD licence. And they need to fix it, pronto!

Cheers,
Wol


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Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 21, 2024 21:35 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

This could get interesting. There's already two copyright owners in that pull request pointing out the violation of *their* license terms, and BSD is just like GPLv2 in that it has no amnesty clause for “oopsie, we screwed up” — violating it is a rights-terminating suicide option that falls back to statutory copyright infringement, which can only be undone by an explicit re-granting from every actual rightsholder.

The company had better pray nobody they've wronged here feels inspired by Patrick McHardy…

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 22, 2024 7:49 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

> This could get interesting. There's already two copyright owners in that pull request pointing out the violation of *their* license terms, and BSD is just like GPLv2 in that it has no amnesty clause for “oopsie, we screwed up” — violating it is a rights-terminating suicide option that falls back to statutory copyright infringement, which can only be undone by an explicit re-granting from every actual rightsholder.

This is perhaps slightly misleading:

* GPLv2 has a clause which explicitly terminates the license if you violate it, and contains no provision for automatic reinstatement upon cure. So by the strict terms of the license, any violation can only be cured with the consent of the licensor. Depending on jurisdiction and the facts of the case, a court might decide that this is unreasonable and apply equitable principles or the local equivalent, but if not, then the license is terminated and the infringing party is required to cease using the software. Some jurisdictions have previously ruled that GPLv2 can only be enforced through contract law and not through copyright law (usually because those systems prefer to limit "infringement" to cases where there was never any valid license at all), but that doesn't necessarily make a difference in terms of what the court ends up ordering.
* BSD-3 (and most other versions of BSD) says that permission is granted "provided that the [...] conditions are met." This is much more vague, but at the same time, it is fairly conventional as contracts go. The conditions are a form of consideration, and when a party fails to meet them, they are in breach of contract. Unfortunately, this clause is an excellent example of why software engineers should not be in the business of evaluating licenses: It probably does not imply termination, at least in common law countries, because those countries have a theory of contract law which promotes "efficient breach" (the idea that, in some cases, everyone would be better off if one party could breach the contract and pay off the other party's damages, rather than having to abide by the strict letter of the contract). If you don't explicitly specify termination or otherwise require specific performance as a remedy, then courts may be reluctant to order it as a matter of public policy, and instead try to work out how much money your counterparty should pay you for the privilege of removing the attribution (read: how much money you personally lost from not having your name/license attributed properly).

The practical reality, however, is that no BSD case is going anywhere near a court of law anytime soon, because it is so much easier for a company to settle a permissive license case (settlement is basically "put the plaintiff's name etc. in a menu that nobody looks at, and maybe pay them some money to go away") than a GPL case (settlement probably involves publishing code that you never intended to be public, may also involve auditing and other stuff the SFC likes to ask for in their settlements).

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 22, 2024 23:55 UTC (Fri) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (1 responses)

Since you seem to know things about things - does it matter that the copyright statements in question were "Copyright (C) 2009 Salvatore Sanfilippo <antirez at gmail dot com>" and not the name of the contributor whose rights are being infringed? Is it harder to claim that you were harmed if it wasn't your name in the removed permission statement anyway? (Assume it was GPL or even SSPL or something if it makes the potential infringement case more real.)

Redis is no longer free software

Posted Mar 23, 2024 2:28 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

It is difficult to make specific statements about what might or might not matter. There are at least a good ~200 jurisdictions in the world that may have an opinion on the matter, but I'm not aware of any relevant litigation, statutes, or case law (which does not mean they don't exist!), so the best I can do is make educated guesses.

My gut says that you can probably get some kind of damages out of a permissive license if you're the copyright holder, even if you're not the person attributed. It's hard to say how those damages should be calculated, and different jurisdictions will have different formulas. Here are some formulas that I could imagine being used:

* Determine the market cost of producing the software from scratch (i.e. "hire [n] software engineers for [k] [weeks/months], and pay them market salaries"). Possibly apply some multiplier or discount to it (which is probably going to be a highly arbitrary number in either case).
* Determine the market cost of advertising equivalent to the attribution. (No, I don't know how they would figure out what kind of advertising is equivalent; probably they would ask both sides to submit proposals and the judge would choose between them or come up with a middle ground.)
* Attribution (to someone other than you) is worthless, so you are only entitled to nominal damages (i.e. not very much).
* Attribution is priceless and/or easy, so you are entitled to specific performance (or some reasonable approximation) even though the license doesn't call for it explicitly.
* In some jurisdictions, authors benefit from a separate legal regime called "moral rights," which specifically protects attribution, and that would have its own system of remedies. However, this theory would make the previous version infringing (since you are not attributed there either), and I'm not sure you want to open that can of worms. Note that in most jurisdictions, moral rights are either difficult or impossible to waive, and it is almost never possible to waive them implicitly (i.e. without the license having very specific legal language explicitly referring to moral rights). On the other hand, some jurisdictions have no (or very limited) moral rights.


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