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Reopen: Legal Definition Conflict in License #251

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LokiFawkes opened this issueSep 26, 2024· 0 comments
Open

Reopen: Legal Definition Conflict in License #251

LokiFawkes opened this issueSep 26, 2024· 0 comments

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@LokiFawkes
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The License is clearly proprietary, forbidding distribution and public modification, only allowing users to read the source code and to privately run their modified versions. However, it describes itself as copyleft.

This is a potential conflict in legal definition, as the definition of copyleft as accepted by society at large forbids this type of license. This type of conflict has undefined behavior in copyright law. A court could, for example, rule that your license is misleading and unenforceable, ranging from a need to edit the License once again to make it enforceable, to invalidating the License entirely and releasing the code to the hands of the public.

In addition, if anyone forks Winamp as part of the process of creating and testing modifications to be staged for a pull request, they would run afoul of the license for the same reason as above - It forbids distribution, and forking on Github is distribution, but also a necessary part of contribution.

Suggested fix: Change to a copyleft license as promised by the preamble of the License, or move Winamp's source code to a more restrictive platform, such as an internally controlled gitlab server.

Reopening because the repo is still violating TOS.

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@LokiFawkes