I don’t really understand the problem here because fairscan is under GPL and all Ente code appears to be AGPL, which is allowed. Ente also did this quite openly (the blog post says that they even contacted the author).
Opensource is not public domain. It frustrates me how often people act like it is.
The entire point of all of the open source licenses is that they are protected by copyright. Anyone can distribute a derivative work, but they can’t remove the original copyright owner, nor claim to be the copyright owner. Similarly they can’t relicense beyond what the original license permits, and even if they do, they still cannot remove the copyright information because the original author[s] have not rescinded their ownership of the code.
But, yeah, Ente could be a bit more thankful and handling this more elegantly.
What Ente did was steal open source code and claim ownership of code that was not theirs to own. They cannot claim ownership of derived code.
Opensource is not public domain. It frustrates me how often people act like it is.
The entire point of all of the open source licenses is that they are protected by copyright. Anyone can distribute a derivative work, but they can’t remove the original copyright owner, nor claim to be the copyright owner. Similarly they can’t relicense beyond what the original license permits, and even if they do, they still cannot remove the copyright information because the original author[s] have not rescinded their ownership of the code.
What Ente did was steal open source code and claim ownership of code that was not theirs to own. They cannot claim ownership of derived code.
score 1 · canonical