On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 08:49:39PM -0500, Jimmy Hess wrote: > > > From: "Constantine A. Murenin" <mureninc () gmail ! com> > > > If we do not hear from you, we will assume that you have no objection. > > Is this for real?! > > Who do they think they are? ... > >People should not bother to respond to such nonsense, and then sue > > OpenSSL for obvious copyright infringement > > I think "Don't bother to respond, and plan to sue" would be a poor > response, that would just hurt everyone involved. Of course > silence does not generally grant permission..... But the people in > that project might be able to convincingly deliver some kind of > argument that they've had implicit or "understood" permissions made > at time of submission to use contributions however the project > collectively agrees to use them.
Bullshit. The FSF, who understands this kind of stuff, was very careful about that with their paperwork. All other organisations that ever wanted to change licences or audit their trees had to spend quite a lot of time contacting authors and fixing things. Basically, the only thing you can do when an author doesn't agree is rewrite stuff from scratch. The OpenSSL authors don't have a magic wand that allows them to do whatever they please. For that matter, if they DID have a magic wand, a much better use of it would be to zap away all the bugs in their code. > Also, there is no work-around for a contributor denying. They might > have the idea of simply Removing and Replacing a contribution (Even > if you can accurately identify and rewrite specific lines of code from > a certain author) does not necessarily make the distribution > Non-infringing, As later code is likely to have built on top of > earlier code. Rewrite from scratch. The importance of code lines is generally greatly exaggerated. Non regression tests are generally way more precious than actual code.