Thiago Macieira wrote:
On Sunday 27 April 2008 18:02:49 John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
Because one of the original contributing companies (Code Factory) silently went bankrupt and their contract did not include copyright assignment according to the company that hired them. Their assets were sold off and tracking it down is a hard task. Feel free to do some detective work on it. The license is not a huge issue, just a point of confusion. You can still release your code under MIT using the AFL license for D-Bus. Most of the D-Bus code is MIT now.
Just some more data: when a company is bankrupt and is liquidated, its assets are sold off and are used to repay its debtholders and shareholders. Without knowing the precise details of the liquidation, we can't know where each asset ended up. (A wild guess, given the fact that it was a small company, is that most if not all ended up with the debt holders, a.k.a. banks)
The intangible assets, such as copyright, may have been completely ignored -- probably because they had an estimated value of $0. If they *had* been sold, tracking who bought them would've been possible, albeit extremely difficult. If they were not sold, how does it work then? Did it get sold by $0 to any of the stakeholders? Or to all? Did the stakeholders simply waive their rights to the copyrights?
So you see how difficult this is. The best way out for us -- who are hackers, not lawyers -- is to rewrite their code.
An interesting point that a swede told me is that in Sweden (this may or may not be correct..), you can't transfer copyright ownership, only license it. So depending on the terms of employment of Andreas, it might be now within his rights to relicense the work.
Maybe FSFE could help us out here?
Thanks, Rob
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