Hello, lead dev here. Yes there's ugly personal history, but as I said, I don't want to get into a he said/he said discussion because it won't go anywhere. Will just say that it's bad enough that it forced us to rewrite an AGPL library (in which I was personally contributing for months) from scratch instead of reusing it, as we had all the permission to do so. That's how bad it got in the background.
That said, I was under the impression that my actions were License compliant due to section 7b
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:
> Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
I.e. since that blurb didn't request explicit preservation, it was ok to remove.
> I don't want to get into a he said/he said discussion because it won't go anywhere
Nothing against you or your project, but this is hardly a "they said I said" thing, this is clearly a violation of the AGPLv3.
It surely could be handled nicer and all that, probably from both sides, not questioning that part, but messing with copyright statements willy-nilly is never a good idea if one isn't absolutely sure (i.e., got legal counsel) that it is OK.
> Will just say that it's bad enough that it forced us to rewrite an AGPL library
One _can_ fork a AGPLv3 project, but one needs to adhere to the terms.
> in which I was personally contributing for months
Again, not wanting to go against you, but you made those contributions accepting the License of the work.
And more importantly the AGPLv3 will also protect your contributions from being re-licensed or have your copyright notices removed, well at least if you did not sign some CLA, i.e., the protection goes both ways.
> I was under the impression that my actions were License compliant due to section 7
Well:
> *(if authorized by the copyright holders of that material)*
Did you get authorization by the copyright holders? As the terms of section 7 are not unconditionally, which is made quite clear, they are just to make the license a bit more flexible to adapt to the rights a project want's to grant to forks to differ what counts as (forbidden) "further restrictions" and what might not.
This is where we would be getting into the ugly background which I don't want to get into here because it's stuff that goes into private conversations and hearsay.
Suffice to say, hlky was absolutely hell-bent on us NOT using the previous AGPL library after we forked it, and used many underhanded means to cause us constant stress and worries. At some point we decided it wasn't worth it.
Hey there lead dev. The reason we don't contact hlky is because he's extremely hostile and has attempted to sabotage us by taking down components of the AI Horde when he flounced. There's also acts from him against myself personally which make it too traumatic to reach out. Even a mention of his name is instantly raising my stress level. What I mean to say, it's not always so easy to "play nice".
As I said, I tried to stick to the facts in this post so it's easy in isolation to think we're being petty dicks, but there's a reason we had to rewrite a WHOLE AGPL3 ML library from scratch, instead of re-use the existing AGPL3 library we had, because it was associated with hlky.
So I discussed this situation generically, because the specific situation doesn't really matter given the question asked. And no, I said it was impolite - but I totally understand that impolite is a big step up from toxic.
The bigger issue is, and maybe this doesn't apply here, but creating a situation where there may be a legal copyright claim to be made simply gives the a-hole more leverage over you, which is exactly what you don't want, if even the mention of his username is triggering.
(I won't point out that you mentioned his username 10 times in your blog post!)
So weigh up the risk/reward. If he's done a DMCA, and you've batted it back, the next step is legal proceedings. A license is exactly that - a license, it never assigns ownership. If I remember correctly, AGPL3 has protections so that he cannot revoke the license on a whim - unless you break the AGPL3 license.
You will never own the copyright to that file, no matter how much you desperately want to, no matter how many times you change the file, no matter if you remove his name, no matter how much you feel like you've paid in dealing with him being a dick. If he can make a case that the file you have is not significantly different in nature to the one he wrote, he still owns that file.
Toxic people will be toxic, but never get into a pissing fight with a skunk.
Would you be open to an interview about Stable Horde? It's currently my favorite open source project involved with text2img. Ping me at [email protected] if so!
