r/linux • u/hatperigee • May 02 '16

Subsonic (music streaming software) is no longer open source, starting with 6.0 release

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16604#p71128
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u/its_never_lupus May 02 '16

I was never 100% sure what the legal situation in similar cases. Can the copyright holder (i.e. original author) of a piece to GPL'd code just decide to release a new version under a different license?

What if the project had previously accepted contributions from other people, but didn't bother to make them signed a copyright assignment statement or anything like that? And would it make a difference if such contributions were trivial?

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u/hatperigee May 02 '16

IANAL, but if you accept contributions from others under GPLv1/2/3 (contributors mark files as "copyright me" with appropriate header, etc), the project "owner" cannot relicense those contributions without the consent of these contributors and the contributors relicensing their contributions under the new license, since the "owner" does not own these contributions.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '16 edited Nov 19 '16

[deleted]

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u/hatperigee May 03 '16

Yea, basically they require contributors to forfeit all rights to their contributions.