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Comment by jchw

20 hours ago

IANAL but unfortunately, I think the fix itself shown here might be too simple to actually clear the bar for copyright eligibility. (And in fairness to copyright law, it is basically the only sane way to fix this.) That means that there's probably not much you can really do, but I will say this looks fucking pathetic, Okta.

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jchw

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rikafurude21  19 hours ago

I'm more confused by the fact that the OP freely submits a PR into an open source repo but then wants to use "copyright" because the code he submitted ended up being used under the wrong name, which was then corrected.

  • jchw  14 hours ago

    Licensing your code under open source licenses does not nullify your rights under copyright law, and the license in this case does not waive any rights to attribution.

    It would indeed be copyright violation to improperly attribute code changes. In this case I would absolutely say a force push is warranted, especially since most projects are leaning (potentially improperly) on Git metadata in order to fulfill legal obligations. (This project is MIT-licensed, but this is particularly true of Apache-licensed projects, which have some obligations that are surprising to people today.) A force push is not the end of the world. You can still generally disallow it, but an egregious copyright mistake in recent history is a pretty good justification. That or, literally, revert and re-add the commit with correct attribution. If you really feel this is asking too much, can you please explain why you think it's such a big problem? If it's such a pain, a good rule of thumb would be to not fuck this up regularly enough that it is a major concern when you have to break the glass.