Potentially invalid public domain relicensing

[emilazy]

Hi there; I work on NixOS/Nixpkgs, a downstream distributor of rsstail. We try to keep up‐to‐date licence information for our packages, I noticed that in 106f6fe the GPLv2 licence was replaced with a note declaring the code to be in the public domain. Putting aside jurisdictional issues with public domain, my concern is that you’ve merged contributions from several other people before that relicensing. The copyright in those contributions would be held by their original authors. Unless you’ve obtained consent from all those past contributors to release their changes into the public domain, to use their work under the GPLv2 licence they were contributed under, you’d have to retain the GPLv2 text, and rsstail as a whole would have to remain under that licence, even if you release your own work on it into the public domain. This is a legal problem for any distribution that wants to package and redistribute rsstail to users, so hopefully you can clarify the situation here – it might be best to simply restore the GPLv2 licence here to avoid copyright issues.

[folkertvanheusden]

I've put it back to GPLv2 now (in commit a5ed53c).

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On Sat, Oct 26, 2024 at 2:05 PM Emily ***@***.***> wrote: Hi there; I work on NixOS/Nixpkgs, a downstream distributor of rsstail. We try to keep up‐to‐date licence information for our packages, I noticed that in 106f6fe <106f6fe> the GPLv2 licence was replaced with a note declaring the code to be in the public domain. Putting aside jurisdictional issues with public domain, my concern is that you’ve merged contributions from several other people before that relicensing. The copyright in those contributions would be held by their original authors. Unless you’ve obtained consent from all those past contributors to release their changes into the public domain, to use their work under the GPLv2 licence they were contributed under, you’d have to retain the GPLv2 text, and rsstail as a whole would have to remain under that licence, even if you release your own work on it into the public domain. This is a legal problem for any distribution that wants to package and redistribute rsstail to users, so hopefully you can clarify the situation here – it might be best to simply restore the GPLv2 licence here to avoid copyright issues. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#7>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AUN5IW5DWS4MTOF67WTQPMTZ5OAQVAVCNFSM6AAAAABQUXYTLWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZSGYYTKOBSGA4DGMA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[emilazy]

Thanks for the extremely quick response to the annoying legal nit‐picking, and thanks for the software :)

Would you be able to restore the full licence text to the repository to comply with clause 1 of the GPLv2? It would be great for us as downstream distributors if you could make a new Git‐tagged release after that, too, as the already‐removed libiconv_hook was causing us issues.

[folkertvanheusden]

Hi, Thanks. I've added an v2.2 tag.

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On Sat, Oct 26, 2024 at 6:37 PM Emily ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks for the extremely quick response to the annoying legal nit‐picking, and thanks for the software :) Would you be able to restore the full licence text to the repository to comply with clause 1 of the GPLv2? It would be great for us as downstream distributors if you could make a new Git‐tagged release after that, too, as the already‐removed libiconv_hook was causing us issues. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#7 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AUN5IW24H7NXJWN7XN3RED3Z5PALTAVCNFSM6AAAAABQUXYTLWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDIMZZGY2DMMRTG4> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[emilazy]

Thank you! 💜 We’ll get an update shipped promptly.