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

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

#21

Post by tlamponi »

dbzer0 wrote: post #20
wokwokwok wrote: post #9

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 co…

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…

  > 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.

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

#22

Post by dbzer0 »

tlamponi wrote: post #21
dbzer0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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., g…

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...

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

#23

Post by tpxl »

dbzer0 wrote: post #22
tlamponi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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., g…

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?

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

#24

Post by dbzer0 »

tpxl wrote: post #23
dbzer0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#25

Post by lostmsu »

planede wrote: post #12

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…

> It's not a matter of style.

This is unnecessarily pedantic. Provided attribution is present in some form, cleaning repeated licensing headers from other files should be perfectly legal.

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

#26

Post by undecisive »

dbzer0 wrote: post #19
undecisive wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey there lead dev. The reason we don't contact hlky is because he's extremely hostile and has attempted to sabotage us by taking down components of the AI Horde when he flounced. There's also acts from him against myself personally which make it too traumatic to reach out. Even a mention of his name is instantly raising my stress level. What I mean to say, it's not always so easy to "play nice". As I said, I tried t…

Sure.

So I discussed this situation generically, because the specific situation doesn't really matter given the question asked. And no, I said it was impolite - but I totally understand that impolite is a big step up from toxic.

The bigger issue is, and maybe this doesn't apply here, but creating a situation where there may be a legal copyright claim to be made simply gives the a-hole more leverage over you, which is exactly what you don't want, if even the mention of his username is triggering.

(I won't point out that you mentioned his username 10 times in your blog post!)

So weigh up the risk/reward. If he's done a DMCA, and you've batted it back, the next step is legal proceedings. A license is exactly that - a license, it never assigns ownership. If I remember correctly, AGPL3 has protections so that he cannot revoke the license on a whim - unless you break the AGPL3 license.

You will never own the copyright to that file, no matter how much you desperately want to, no matter how many times you change the file, no matter if you remove his name, no matter how much you feel like you've paid in dealing with him being a dick. If he can make a case that the file you have is not significantly different in nature to the one he wrote, he still owns that file.

Toxic people will be toxic, but never get into a pissing fight with a skunk.

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