AI Horde’s AGPL3 hordelib receives DMCA take-down from hlky

There is a similar story about retaining/stripping copyright notices in the Linux kernel (btrfs).

https://lwn.net/Articles/912355/

I think stripping copyright notices is only appropriate if one entity unambiguously owns the copyright of all the code (which may imply not accepting outside contributions or requiring signing a CLA, and not copying code over from other code bases even when the license matches).

> In the process I stripped out the explicit license mention in those files, because our whole repository is licensed under AGPL3, and it goes against our style to add unnecessary licenses to each file.

It's not a matter of style. Also AGPL3 requires attribution, let alone retaining copyright information, like many other FOSS licenses.

Starting the discussion with the DMCA process is certainly a dick move, but we will never know if the other party started with it, or brought up the issue informally first.

hlky wrote most of the original code for the project, and might understandably think it’s “his” project. Setting aside whether his actions (which pissed everyone off and led to the code being rewritten from scratch without him under this new ‘hordelib’ package) were right or wrong, I can see how he would object to the other devs trying to remove his name from the license and basically pretend he doesn’t exist.

IANAL, but I think it comes down to your interpretation of section 4:

> You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you

> receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and

> appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice;

> keep intact all notices stating that this License and any

> non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code;

> keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all

> recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

So by removing the copyright notice from "each copy" of the "convey"ed source code, I think you could argue they violated this.

But as others have argued, even if you don't believe that this section forbids it, the polite thing to do would be to either a) get permission to remove the copyright notices, or at the very least b) create a file (e.g. CONTRIBUTORS.md, or a section of the readme) and place the copyright information in there. Saying "Ooh, we don't like X's name at the top of the file, it's too ugly" without any attempt to maintain some acknowledgement might not be a violation, but certainly isn't within the spirit of the AGPL, the main point of which is to "(1) assert copyright on the software".

Hey there, lead dev here. The issue was not brought up informally. It was straight to DMCAs. That person has attempted to sabotage our project before.

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.