Apologies for continuing about this after you've all gone back to talking about something else (But that's what happens when you're not at your computer 24/7), but apparently people seem to think copyright law and licenses work completely the opposite way from how they actually do. Or maybe they think we're living in bizarro world. That makes me
.
I am hoping not to have to say anything else on the subject
, but perhaps I shouldn't be so optimistic.
I'll make this easy.
When we ("we" being the current dev team) came into possession of the code, there was no license file, and no license mentioned to us. I don't really know (or honestly, care) who stripped the license as I've never met them.
Hello? Yes, you have. Like I said, in the forked version of openss13 which I made, I inadvertently omitted it from the source package which the goons based their fork on, and from what I understand, you based your fork on some version of theirs (you have the stuff I added, without the stuff I added after they forked their version off). I am not $ALL_THE_PEOPLE_WHO_MADE_OPENSS13_AND_THE_ORIGINAL_AUTHOR_OF_SS13, just one person who created a fork which added the AI and other stuff which everyone's version of SS13 nowadays is based on, so I don't have the authority to blanket relicense all the source code! So, the license on the code and on the compiled version of ss13 itself did not change or cease to exist when I accidentally omitted the one file in which the openss13 devs had bothered to write what the license was.
All I have to say is, by the time we got it there was no license and thus we never did and also can't break it. As such, status quo.
I'm sorry, what? You think that removing a file makes the license on the source code disappear, and makes it possible to modify them freely? Haha. No. That's not how the law works. If that was the case, I could take random GPL'd programs by the FSF, delete the license file, delete all mention of the license in the files, and relicense them as whatever I wanted and make them closed-source. The FSF would be throwing a fit and wouldn't be able to do anything about it, if that was how the law worked. You'd see it happening all over the place.
Of course, you CAN choose not to agree to the terms of a license on some program or source code, which is similar to the license not existing, but that wouldn't mean you'd be able to freely modify the source code. Far from it. It would still be protected by copyright law, which would forbid you from modifying the code, or redistributing it, etc. The way copyright law works is that any permissions you haven't been granted, you do not have. The GPL or LGPL grants you permissions which copyright law wouldn't normally give you, so long as you abide by the conditions of the license. Other open-source licenses do the same kind of thing. BSD-style licenses grant you pretty much every permission possible, so with one of those you WOULD be able to switch between open-source and closed-source at will (without having to change the license). But that's getting off topic, because you can't arbitrarily change the license on code that someone else wrote unless you possess the copyright to that code (you don't).
My concern here is mainly the fact that the whole "it's not licensed" thing is a misunderstanding resulting from a mistake I made, and I would like to see it corrected, and that "we can do whatever we want because it's not licensed" is a massive misunderstanding of copyright law in general (not to mention that it IS licensed, regardless of whether you're missing the file which said what the license was or not). And I would be very happy if people actually understood how copyright law and open-source licenses worked, rather than merely ASSUMING they work completely the opposite way from how they actually work.
Of course, the openss13 devs really should have added a note to the beginning of every source file stating that it was LGPLed, but they didn't bother to spend the effort to do that, and instead just put one file containing the license terms in the main ss13 folder instead...DURR IM AN IDIOT IMA SUE YOU ALL SUCKAERS HAHAH GIMME MONEY U ALL SUCK U GO JAIL
You know, I never said I was going to sue anyone, and obvious troll is obvious, but here, munch on this cluebat while I respond anyways. You must not have the first idea how the LGPL works either
. You have to have the binaries for the LGPL to require that you be able to access the source.
I was concerned for the devteam's sake that giving out the binaries (to the current version) would let other people demand the source (but only the source to that specific version, IIRC), which the devteam doesn't want to give out. Right now as long as everyone who is hosting is also on the devteam then the devs aren't violating the LGPL (except for not stating that it's LGPLed anywhere).
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