It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem once a past contributor notices.
It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.
Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.
True but there is a workaround: a patchset to a specific upstream git commit and local compilation. Pretty much what PKGBUILD already does. LAME was developed this way for years. It was a patchset to reference source code under a nonfree license.
The licence doesn’t permit derivative works, so no forks and no downstream packages.
the license change is invalid as it’s based from GPL3 code and previous contributors did not allow the change
It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem once a past contributor notices.
It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.
Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.
Make a fork that supports Linux as satire since the whole situation is so crazy.
Edit: The joke being you could argue it’s fair use.
You’re right, the license is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (weird choice for a code license, but OK)
It’s not an open source license. Even CC warns against it because it isn’t a free media license.
CC4.0 licenses work for code. The language was made generic and no longer talks about performing music on stage and such.
Better to use CC NC for non commercial works than to homebrew your own text. CC BY and CC BY SA are GPLv3 compatible.
🏴☠️ 🦜 🏝️ ⛵
It’s easy enough to fork the code as it existed under GPL3. Violentmonkey did that when they forked from Tampermonkey.
This dev also doesn’t sound like he wants to put much effort into enforcing his license in the first place.
True but there is a workaround: a patchset to a specific upstream git commit and local compilation. Pretty much what PKGBUILD already does. LAME was developed this way for years. It was a patchset to reference source code under a nonfree license.
It’s crazy that this is legal.
Most software is like this, but you also don’t get to look at the source code either.
It’s probably not, unless all contributors agreed to the license change.
AFAIK they did.