Comment by amtamt

5 months ago

Say a community builds a hall with an explicit intent of community use only, led by single person or a group, and then a person/ a group is appointed as a caretaker. Caretaker of the community hall decides unilaterally to convert the hall into a business convention center, razing old building to ground and rebuilding, disregarding community wishes, to make hall business friendly. How would you react to this situation? Caretaker has the ownership of the community assets, including the ground on which the hall is standing?

my understanding of the situation is:

Is the caretaker paying from his own pocket to maintain the hall? no

Is the caretaker paying from his own pocket for community usage of the hall? no

Is the caretaker spending time to maintain the community hall? yes

Is caretaker obliged to spend time on community hall? no

Is caretaker free to stop spending time on community hall? yes.

Is caretaker free to raze current hall, build new hall on same ground for new purposes WITH community agreement? YES

Is caretaker free to raze current hall, build new hall on same ground for new purposes WITHOUT community agreement (even if paying all the bill)? NO

Is caretaker free to build another similar hall someplace else? YES

Reasoning of your comment is of someone who is hell bent on staking claims on community resources (like big companies) without having slightest concern of the wishes or well-being of the community. Not sure of the commenter's motive either, given the new account with just two comments, supporting such blatant disregard of basic human decency.

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amtamt

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hoopyKt  5 months ago

I think your metaphor is flawed though, firstly because we're not talking about the maintainer being a caretaker, for all intents and purposes they are the owner of chardet, just not a subset of the IP within, those are two separate entities here. Secondly, the original author doesn't have any ties to this project within the last decade, to imply that they're paying for it or have any ownership over how the project is operated beyond the scope of the license is just wrong.

If you'd want to correct the metaphor, this is a more accurate understanding of the situation:

Is the maintainer obligated to the terms of the original license? yes

Does the original IP holder have any rights beyond that license? no

Is the maintainer free to raze the current hall, as long as the IP-holder's property is appropriately removed first? YES

Now if it were to come out that ownership of the chardet name, pip package, or github organization were transferred to the maintainer under an agreement that the project always stay LGPL regardless of the actual terms of the license that's a whole other thing, but nobody has stated that is the case. The only contention is whether LGPL was violated by the rewrite under a new license, but if that's not the case it is entirely the prerogative of the project maintainers to do as they wish.

That's what free software is all about.

If the community wants the old "community hall" it still exists, they can still use it and do what they want with it. They have a right to the hall, but the maintainer has a right to the repository and the package name and one does not nullify the other.

  • hoopyKt  5 months ago

    There is a certain irony here as well that this project was considered for actual community ownership by being added to the standard library, but it was decided that it was ineligible due to the LGPL license. Had this been MIT from the start you'd actually be correct about the community having some kind of ownership over how the project is operated, but that isn't the case here, it's not community owned. It's owned by the maintainer, it's their IP broadly and they can do as they wish within that LGPL license, including removing the LGPL licensed code.

    • amtamt  5 months ago

      Just one question, why maintainer is hell bent on using existing name and removing LGPL and not create an entirely new project by new name and new license (after all this is completely new code... right)?

      First reason would be use the "name recall", and second guess would be to do another rug-pull to re-licence under some other conditions.

      > It's owned by the maintainer

      This is completely in-correct. GPL and variants (FOSS, not OSS) were meant to make software free of "any ownership".

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